Interop in Las Vegas two weeks ago featured the usual litany of big vendors, but it’s fun to nose around to see what the smaller shops have cooked up.
One relative newcomer with a big presence was Xirrus, a Wi-Fi hardware company that has been selling products for a year and landed the job of providing wireless access for the show floor. That mapped neatly to Xirrus’ strength, which is high-performance, high-capacity Wi-Fi. The company offers saucer-shaped access points that contain four, eight or 16 802.11 a/b/g radios.
The FCC regulates the power of Wi-Fi radios, so Xirrus gets greater capacity by using directional arrays to create sectors in a given space, just as the cell phone industry does. The result is two times the range and effectively four times the coverage of conventional Wi-Fi, says Alan Amrod, Xirrus’ vice president of sales and marketing.
Xirrus does all the media access control (MAC) layer integration, coordination and synchronization, and the arrays sense each other and auto adjust so the radios don’t step on each other, Amrod says.
The company installed 11 arrays at the conference, each of which has 864Mbps of capacity, to support an expected 3,000 to 4,000 concurrent users. Access points cost $750 per radio.
Identity Engines, founded in 2004, was at Interop showing off a network identity management appliance that can be used to authenticate users in wired, wireless or VPN environments. The key difference between the appliance and a regular AAA Radius server is inclusion of a policy engine and integration with “back-end directory stores sufficient to extract key user information for authorization decisions,” the company says.
The device makes access decisions based on assigned privileges, the device being used, location and any relevant attributes. The company started shipping the product last year and has 30 customers. An appliance can support 5,000 to 10,000 active users. A starter package costs $20,000.
ETelemetry launched its first product, Locate, at Interop in 2004, and was back showing off new tools.
Locate is an appliance that can passively map a person’s name to an IP address, MAC address and switch port, and then correlate that with office location from a staff directory. Location information helps speed reaction to problems, company officials said. ETelemetry also debuted Metron EBA, which tracks those and other communication patterns and builds a social network map for analysis. Metron EBA costs $15,000 for 500 users.
Since then, eTelemetry has rolled out Locate 911, which helps locate VoIP phones as they move around campus.
