Introducting a new class of wireless LAN assurance tool
VeriWave got their start building test equipment focused on wireless LANs, initially in a narrow, very technical world important only to design and manufacturing engineers. But the company has steadily introduced innovation after innovation, moving it in the direction of providing engineer-class tools, but wrapped in IT-friendly packages. I’m a huge fan of their WaveQoE and WaveAgent tools, just for starters, and I’ve used them in testing projects for Network World and others. Their latest product, WaveDeploy, just announced today, is an interesting hybrid of (dare I say it) site-survey tool and a class of product that we’ve not seen before – what we’re calling performance assurance tools. Get ready – this is going to be big, influential, and an important new direction for enterprise WLAN management.
Just to recap – I’ve never been fond of the site survey as a requisite element WLAN deployments, with a few exceptions in the case of truly pathological buildings. Site surveys are designed to tell the installer where the APs should go, but they fail miserably at such in most cases because the site survey considers coverage and not capacity – often the ultimate metric of performance. And that’s the situation WaveDeploy remedies – it provides one-time, or, ideally, ongoing performance monitoring based on real-world Layer-7 traffic generation and a lot of sophisticated software that generates easy-to-use analysis. Being able to examine not just traffic patterns but real throughput (and much more) can quickly isolate performance issues, speeding resolution and keeping operating expense to a minimum. That’s a major theme this year – converting OpEx to CapEx – and it’s the key to long-term financial success in any enterprise-class WLAN deployment.
If you want to try WaveDeploy, there’s a free version available. I can’t wait to use WaveDeploy in a real installation, and, based on my previous experience with VeriWave’s products, my expectations are high. But I’m willing to bet that this type of functionality will regardless become very common over the next few years, and that it will pay for itself in reduced operating costs in very many installations indeed.
OK, I know what you’re thinking. Enterprise IT managers have often complained to me that deploying a wireless LAN seems to involve a lot of moving parts. There’s the WLAN itself (APs and usually controllers), its management system, often application and/or location appliances, assurance tools for IDS/IPS and a lot more, and on and on. Thus it may not seem like adding ever more to the mix is a good strategy. Au contraire – performance assurance is really more of a smack-yourself-in-the-forehead duh than a complicating factor. Because if a wireless LAN at its essence isn’t all about the performance, then why install one at all?
