* Hybrid architectures emerge just as controllers pick up deployment steam
Results are in from the fourth annual Kubernan Wireless LAN State-of-the-Market survey. Responses from subscribers to Webtorials, a networking educational Web site, were culled in June from about 300 individuals involved in evaluating, recommending, purchasing or managing WLANs for their employers.
This year’s survey, sponsored by Nortel, reflects in part the elusive task of synching actual network implementation with the technology or architecture currently being hyped. For example, nearly five years past the industry debut of centralized WLAN controller architectures, 46% of the respondents said they are now using or plan to deploy such networks within the next six months.
So companies seem to have finally gotten the scalability message about centralized WLAN controllers – just in time for the next architecture to arrive on deck. Newer hybrid, or “split,” architectures centralize some management- and security-related WLAN functions but distribute others (such as traffic forwarding) to radio access points. Their goal is to avoid central controller bottlenecks and decrease latency of real-time traffic between two endpoints.
But only 23% of survey respondents expressed awareness of these architectures.
For its part, Nortel aims to deliver a hybrid Wi-Fi architecture next year that is not a separate overlay network like most Wi-Fi systems we know today. Rather, it integrates Wi-Fi with Ethernet wiring closet switches and their associated virtual LAN (VLAN) configurations to create a single network that, on the wireless side, splits functions between the wiring closet Ethernet switch and distributed APs.
In a Webcast that you can access at the Webtorials site, Nortel’s director of enterprise wireless, Kyle Klassen, provides some fairly detailed education about the tradeoffs between scalability and VLAN mobility in overlay hybrid architectures. He also describes how an integrated wired/wireless wiring closet solution might bridge those gaps. To access his talk – but first hear me provide analysis on the survey results, voice trends, 802.11n plans, 802.11a uptake, and the status of enterprise WLAN buildouts – click here.
