Aerohive: Fast, but a little rough around the edges

Editor's note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, for a full rundown of how it fared in our testing across 10 UTM categories, please see our full coverage. 

Like many relatively new products, Aerohive's HiveAP 340 showed both extreme promise and a few rough edges.

The HiveAP was fastest in nearly all of our pure-802.11n tests, and it delivered the highest throughput for downstream traffic (the most common for most enterprises) in tests that mixed 802.11n and non-802.11n clients. But we couldn't complete mixed-mode testing with short frames because of a software issue, and latency and jitter were very high in some test cases. Aerohive says it has since fixed these issues but we did not verify that claim.

Aerohive's access points also consumed more power than other systems, requiring PoE-plus power supplies. The access points can automatically reduce power usage to conform to standard 802.3af power supplies, but data rates will likely be lower.

Unlike many enterprise WLAN systems, the Aerohive access point does not use a controller. Instead multiple access points work together in what the company calls a "hive" to provide the same RF management functions as a controller. The company also sells a standalone appliance for configuration management and client monitoring, but access points can operate with or without the appliance in place. Many Aerohive engineers came from the Juniper (Netscreen) firewall group, and it shows: The access points offer strong firewall and IDS/IPS support.

Score: 3.65 out of 5

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