The
great thing about wireless networks is the freedom to
roam about
your campus, home, or office. The trouble is this
freedom
comes at a price, and enterprise network
administrators
are finding out that managing all this
mobility
is messy and fraught with multiple complicating
factors,
making wireless networks more of a burden than
dealing
with wired connections.
The
reasons have to do with a combination of poor tools and
the ad
hoc nature of wireless networks themselves. The good
news is
that many vendors are stepping up to the plate with
new
products that can make some of this pain go away.
I got
to see some of these products as one of the "Best in
Show"
judges in the wireless category at the Networld+Interop
show in
Las Vegas this past week. And while the show floor
was so
quiet you could hold your own religious service, the
booths
of the wireless vendors were all crowded with
attendees,
many of who were not wearing any vendor-logo'ed
shirts
(and thus perhaps real buyers). The three products
that
fellow judge Sean Doherty of Network Computing and I
picked
as finalists were from Chantry Networks, AirMagnet and
AirWave
Wireless Inc. Each of them solves the problem of
having
multiple wireless access points and being able to
manage
them in slightly different ways.
AirWave,
with their Management Platform v 2.0
(www.airwave.com)
takes the policy management approach,
looking
at your collection of access points as if it were one
huge
network. It solves the problem of being able to keep all
of your
APs on the same firmware version and with the same
configuration.
What if you have already purchased APs from
multiple
vendors? Then it will still be able to manage them,
and
push out configuration changes to multiple products
easily.
That was a really nice feature that caught our
attention.
The only trouble is that the product doesn't yet
support
APs from most of the major enterprise-line vendors
yet.
(This is at odds with what you can find on the vendor's
web
site, which was a big disappointment.) Also, it doesn't
handle
discovery of huge networks very well either: we asked
the
folks from AirWave to do a census of all the wireless APs
on the
Interop show network and they could only discover
about
75 of them in an hour. The trouble is the show network
has two
very large IP address spaces: a class A and a class B
address.
These take time to scan through. The
nice thing
about
their discovery algorithms is that they examine both
the
wired and wireless addresses and try to match up the APs
accordingly.
I would give the product a little more time, and
with
wider vendor support it might be a real gem.
Chantry,
with their BeaconWorks family of products
(www.chantrynetworks.com)
looks at your wireless network as
just a
collection of routers that are centrally managed and
can
handle scalability and reliability issues. The main
advantages
to their approach is automatic fail-over and self-
healing
networks. They also support non-Chantry APs as well
to
allow users to roam across the entire campus (the non-
Chantry
products don't do the fail-over however).
Both
Chantry and AirWave are only supporting 802.11b products
at this
time. The winner of the category was AirMagnet, with
their
Distributed System (www.airmagnet.com). Both Sean and I
liked
the fact that they supported 802.11a and b products
now.
Think of the AirMagnet system as a distributed Sniffer
for
wireless networks, similar to how that product extended
network
analysis tools for wired networks many years ago. Its
main advantage
is wireless discovery of what is running
across
your airwaves. AirMagnet has been selling a stand-
alone
analysis tool for about a year now and this distributed
concept
is a natural extension. Here is the scenario: You
need to
instrument your campus with a bunch of probes –
either
by running software on a laptop or by installing one
of
their dedicated hardware probes. But once you do deploy
this
stuff you can glean all sorts of information about the
state
of your wireless network. At the show, AirMagnet very
quickly
found over 200 APs in the Vegas Convention Center,
including
about 75 rogue APs that the network control center
staff
hadn't yet accounted for. Granted, this was a very
extreme
and chaotic environment, but a good one to stress
test
the product and show how you can track down APs that
don't
have encryption turned on, or that are misconfigured.
Another
nice feature is that you can see if having too many
APs
talking on the same channel is clogging up your radio
frequencies.
It doesn't do the policy management as nicely as
the
AirWave system though.
What I
thought after looking at these and other entries for
the
category was that I wish I could pick and choose the best
features
from each product and design my own wireless
management
system. My ideal product would have the policy
management
features of AirWave, the discovery and scanning
properties
of AirMagnet, and the reliability and scalability
deployment
features of Chantry. While I am wishing for the
best
possible product, I might as well add to this some neat
mapping
features that is found in the Trapeze Networks
product
where you can figure out placement of your APs given
the
radio properties of your actual buildings. And to top
things
off, my wish list would include support a wide variety
of
enterprise-class APs from Cisco, Orinoco, Proxim, and the
like.
Too bad it doesn't exist yet.
This
shows you the complexity involved in supporting
enterprise-class
wireless networks. At least there are a few
bright
people working on the problem. Maybe by this time next
year we
will have some solid solutions in place.
Entire contents
copyright 2003 by David Strom, Inc.
David Strom,
dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
Port Washington
NY 11050
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