NETWORKING – ENTERPRISE

HPE ARUBA 630 SERIES WI-FI 6E

WINNER: OVERALL

As the first lineup of enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 6E access points on the market, the 630 series APs from Aruba Networks leverages the additional spectrum made available through the opening up of the 6GHz band. Offering Wi-Fi 6E provides customers with faster connections, lower congestion and broader channels. The Aruba 630 access points offer speeds of up 3.9 Mbps—using three dedicated radios, which cover the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands in addition to 6GHz—enabling high bandwidth and low latency even for demanding services such as IoT, video and AR/VR. A part of the Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP), the access points also benefit from Aruba ESP capabilities such as prediction and resolution of device issues before they become a problem; data analysis and identification of anomalies; and securing of unknown devices connected to the network.

Subcategory Winner—Technology: Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Series

Included in Cisco’s Catalyst 8000 Edge Series is the Catalyst 8500 Series Edge Platform, aimed at large-scale data center or colocation sites with integrated 40G and 100G Ethernet ports in a single rack unit. The 8500 is powered by Cisco’s proprietary ASIC for high-performance, scale and integrated security.

Finalist: CommScope Ruckus ICX 7550 

CommScope’s Ruckus ICX 7550 switches bring connectivity at the edge for Wi-Fi 6 with up to 38 ports and 90 watts of 802.3bt Power over Ethernet per port. The switches offer 100-gigabit Ethernet uplinks to increase network capacity on existing optical wire infrastructure.

Finalist: Extreme Networks CoPilot

Extreme Networks CoPilot, a software feature that’s part of the ExtremeCloud IQ platform, provides automation that enables customers and partners to more easily execute time-sensitive tasks and monitor highly distributed network environments, while being 99 percent free of false alarms.

Finalist: Juniper Networks EX4400

Juniper Networks EX4400 is an access switch for the cloud that has security and performance meant for campus deployments, with Power over Ethernet, MACsec AES-256, microsegmentation using group-based policies, flow-based telemetry and EVPN-VXLAN to the access layer.