* Wireless to snag spotlight at N+I
By the time you read this, the competitive fur should already be flying at NetWorld+Interop 2003, where wireless networking will take center stage.
The technology history books might one day cite N+I 2003 as the official date when wireless LAN “went mainstream” in enterprises. If you are attending the event, take advantage of this opportunity to begin developing a pro/con matrix of vendors and their myriad versions of “next-generation architectures” as they apply to your own environment.
Start-ups that began making company and product launch announcements in recent weeks will be stepping up to the plate with product demos and technical details. (Think Airespace, AirFlow, Aruba, Chantry, Trapeze, and Vivato.) Traditional wired network equipment vendors that recently announced WLAN products, such as Extreme Networks and Nortel, will also for the first time hawk their wares to the WLAN buying public.
Be wary of very high “market-ecture” levels in the air. With so many vendors in a crowded space, ask each potential vendor what sustainable competitive advantage it offers that is applicable to your enterprise environment. By “sustainable,” I mean something that really matters to your organization over the long haul. Support for certain individual point features might not matter in a few months, because all vendors will eventually support them.
For example, Power over Ethernet (POE) is a very important capability that saves significant time, money, and effort. But it’s a common-denominator capability; if you’re not getting it, there is something wrong. Still, vendors do package and sell POE capabilities differently, which could matter to you in terms of price, real estate requirements, manageability and scalability. So find out specifics, rather than just checking a box next to “POE” on a list of feature requirements.
Vendors will have a tendency to “invent” problems that they solve to sound different. Dig for details about how each supplier approaches large-scale provisioning and installation of ceiling-mounted access points. How do they integrate with the wired network, in terms of access control and management? Are any tools available that enable remote channel-setting, interference detection and avoidance, AP monitoring and troubleshooting? Do such tools cost extra or are they part of the basic system?
If a WLAN vendor routes across the LAN instead of switches and purports that this is more scalable, ask how and why. Also, given that switching is usually faster than routing, what impact can you expect on performance?
You get the picture.
For better or for worse, the WLAN focus of N+I 2003 signals that the game of WLAN vendor musical chairs is formally afoot; there far more vendors than spots in the market. So vendor survivability – to the degree that you can predict it – is yet another consideration.
