Cisco, Aruba beef up branch and home office wireless support
Some of the enterprise-class wireless LAN vendors have been busy putting remote-site Wi-Fi experiences onto a par with those in campus sites while easing security and management issues for the IT department.
For example, Cisco recently announced a teleworker product family, dubbed OfficeExtend, scheduled to ship next month. It includes the Cisco Aironet 600 dual-band 802.11n APs ($419, list), purpose-built for the home worker, that sports four Ethernet ports to support IP phones, printers and other devices. The APs enable creation of two service set identifiers (SSIDs), one for business activity and the other for personal uses, says Sylvia Hooks, senior manager, mobility, at Cisco.
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The AP also supports split tunneling, which allows non-employees in the household to connect directly to the Internet without piggybacking on the work connection through the business’s data center, she says. IT departments manage the devices from their Cisco Wireless Control System and basically extend all Cisco’s enterprise-class features — Cisco CleanAir interference management, ClientLink legacy-device performance-enhancement capabilities and VideoStream for enhancing wireless multicast transmissions — to home offices as though they were corporate sites.
There are also new controller options in stand-alone form factor and in the Wireless Services Module form factor for Cisco’s Catalyst 6500 switch. They aren’t necessary to support the APs (you can use other Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers), but they do have a 10Gbps backplane, Hooks says, so they can support up to 500 remote APs from the data center.
Meanwhile, as part of its recent Mobile Virtual Enterprise (MOVE) architecture announcement last month, Aruba Networks announced Aruba Instant, aimed at branches, which the company claims can “light up an enterprise-grade network of up to 16 APs in three minutes or less,” says Scott Calzia, senior manager of marketing. They do this by virtualizing controller capabilities and distributing them out to the branch APs.
What’s going on? Both companies have long had other gear aimed at non-headquarters sites. For example, Cisco has its Hybrid Remote Edge Access Point (H-REAP), and Aruba offers the Remote Access Points (RAPs).
Well, both Cisco and Aruba take controller-based approaches to WLAN networking and there are issues of 1) WAN survivability, in other words, the WLAN continuing to work if the WAN connection to a central controller is lost; and 2) getting enterprise-class features, policies and experiences to remote sites without the user (or IT) having to do anything special.
One approach, of course, is to buy WLAN controllers for the branch/remote sites, but that gets pricey if you are highly distributed. Yet if you put the controller in the data center, the WAN becomes the single point of failure at sites that don’t have backup links.
So here’s how it breaks down.
The Cisco H-REAP is the device that distributes switching to APs, so that folks already connected to the WLAN remain connected if the WAN breaks. It’s aimed primarily at retail environments, Hooks says.
Unlike the H-REAP, the Cisco Aironet 600 is not about WAN survivability; it’s about making the home office experience like that of headquarters and with the same IT security and management processes and procedures. Unlike the H-REAP, the 600 tunnels all traffic back to the core, so there are no additional policies to configure for the home worker, and the connection works just as it would if the user were local. However, operation is vulnerable to a WAN failure.
The H-REAP could be thought of more as a competitor to Aruba Instant, in that both APs distribute the traffic forwarding to avoid the WLAN impact of WAN breakages.
The Cisco 600 more closely competes with the Aruba RAP-5WN, which similarly extends policy to remote sites. However, the 600 is a dual-radio, dual-band 802.11n device, while the RAP-5WN is a single-radio device. The Aruba device, however, also supports a cellular modem for a backup wireless link.
