The quandary of managing the wired with the wireless network

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The complexity of WLAN management

A wireless network's susceptibility to environmental conditions contributes to the complexity of managing it. To deal with the physical elements, enterprises often deploy dedicated tools, such as modeling and simulation software or radio frequency (RF) monitoring wares. (See related story on the various wireless standards.)

In addition, wireless network managers need operational software, which typically comes from their WLAN infrastructure vendor, to tackle such tasks as managing encryption keys, provisioning user access and keeping firmware up to date. On top of that an enterprise might run an overlay service, such as wireless intrusion prevention.

This all can add up to a sea of consoles - and that's just for the wireless side. Still elusive is the ability to manage wired and wireless networks from the same console, using the same techniques.

Configuration of wireless infrastructure and devices ultimately should be wrapped into larger network and systems management frameworks, says Rachna Ahlawat, a research director at Gartner. Vendors such as CA, HP and IBM have made progress letting their respective management platforms import data from WLAN management software, but that work has been more for the purposes of reporting than for taking management action. "They've just started scratching the surface," Ahlawat says.

Still, the tools available to help network executives manage WLANs are better than they used to be. In particular, vendors have shifted from autonomous access points to controller-based architectures that allow centralized management and configuration.

John Turner remembers when his team had to service access points individually. "If we wanted to change [a service set identifier] or update the code or add something, we had to go out and touch each of the access points individually," says Turner, who is director for networks and systems at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

"I only have two people who do network management, for the wired and the wireless. When we had a dozen access points it wasn't so bad, when it was two dozen it was OK, but when it hit 36 it was ridiculous."

When Brandeis decided 18 months ago to blanket its 100-building campus with wireless access - a project requiring the deployment of more than 800 access points - Turner knew manageability had to be a top priority. The university chose Aruba Networks' gear.

Aruba espouses the idea of thin access points, managed by centralized controllers. The architecture lets Turner's team manage the wireless network from one location.

"We've done software upgrades on the Aruba system, we've made SSID changes, we've done a lot of different things here and there. It's a no-brainer. The access points are just the delivery mechanism. There isn't anything we have to do to them other than make sure they're plugged in," Turner says.

WLAN infrastructure vendors, such as Aruba, Cisco and Trapeze Networks, have done a good job of bolstering the management features in their product sets - but each vendor's software is designed to manage only its own infrastructure products, Ahlawat says. For heterogeneous environments, such vendors as AirWave Wireless and Wavelink offer specialized wireless network management software that lets enterprises manage several different makes of infrastructure products. "But there still isn't any vendor that can give me a solution for common wired and wireless. The vendors haven't made this a priority," she says.