Accounting For All Access Points

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 recent Networld Interop show in Las Vegas (see "Hot New Networking Products," page 18). While the show floor was so quiet you could hold a religious service, the booths of the wireless vendors were crowded with attendees, many of whom were not wearing vendor-logo'ed shirts (and perhaps were real buyers).

The three products that fellow judge Sean Doherty of Network Computing and I picked as finalists were from AirWave Wireless, Chantry Networks and AirMagnet. Each solves the problem of having multiple wireless access points (APs) and being able to manage them in slightly different ways.

• With its Management Platform v 2.0, AirWave takes the policy-management approach, looking at a collection of APs as if it were one huge network. The product 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 nice feature that really caught our attention.
• The only trouble is that the product doesn't support APs from most of the major enterprise-line vendors yet. 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 problem is the show network has two very large IP address spaces: a class A and a class B. These take time to scan through. Still, I would give the product a little more time; with wider vendor support it might be a real gem.
• Chantry, with its BeaconWorks family of products, looks at a wireless network as a collection of routers that are centrally managed and can handle scalability and reliability issues. The main advantages to its approach are automatic failover and self-healing networks. It also supports non-Chantry APs, as well, to allow users to roam across the entire campus, although the non-Chantry products don't do the failover.
• The winner of the category was AirMagnet's Distributed System. We liked that it supports both 802.11a and b products; Chantry and AirWave only support 802.11b at this time. Think of AirMagnet's 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 the airwaves.

AirMagnet found more than 200 APs in the Vegas Convention Center very quickly, including about 75 APs that the network-control center staff hadn't even accounted for. Granted, this was a very extreme and chaotic environment, but it was a good one to stress-test the product and show how one can track down APs that don't have encryption turned on, or that are misconfigured.

If I could pick and choose the best features from each product and design my own wireless management system, it would have the policy-management features of AirWave, the discovery and scanning properties of AirMagnet, and the reliability and scalability deployment features of Chantry.

In any case, the complexity involved in supporting enterprise-class wireless networks is clear. At least there are a few bright people working on the problem.