Managing Wireless Networks

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 last 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 whom 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. Each of them solves the problem of having multiple wireless access points (APs) and being able to manage them in slightly different ways.

AirWave, with its 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 its 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 its approach is automatic failover 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 failover, however).

Both Chantry and AirWave only support 802.11b products at this time. The winner of the category was AirMagnet, with its Distributed System (www.airmagnet.com). Both Sean and I liked the fact that it supports both 802.11a and b products. 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 standalone 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 more than 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.