CatalystTech

AirWave is a management suite for both wireless and wired networks.  Its suite of tools provide a simple to use, multi-vendor environment.  The robust offerings are great for the sprawling enterprise. With scalability into the thousands of nodes, AirWave has the ability to manage a tremendous network.  Its features have been so far out of reach for the smaller networks.  Modern SMB environments can be just as complex.  Aruba answers with Airwave OnDemand.

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Aruba Networks is the first vendor to receive Polycom Voice Interoperability for Enterprise Wireless (VIEW) Certification for its adaptive 802.11n wireless LANs. Prior to this certification, voice over wireless LAN handsets from Polycom, Nortel, Avaya, Alcatel and NEC could only be supported on 802.11a/b/g wireless LANs. As a result, hospitals, hotels, education campuses and back-office environments that needed in-building mobile voice and high speed data were unable to upgrade to an 802.11n wireless LAN. That situation has now been rectified – with VIEW certification in hand, you can now offer converged data and voice over wireless LAN solutions built on Aruba’s adaptive 802.11n platform.
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The SonicWALL TZ190 network security appliance offers advanced features and Internet access backup all in one device. Designed for the small office security in mind, the TZ190 protects against worms, viruses, Trojans, spy-ware and malicious code. By enabling Deep Inspection you can be certain your organization will be protected against web, FTP, email and various other attack methods.

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The Polycom (formerly Spectralink) 8020 and 8030 WiFi Phones (a.k.a Avaya 3641 and 3645) are ruggedized.  Just how ruggedized are they?  Are we talking Hummer tough or Geo Tracker tough?  Below are a few videos from the guys over at Polycom showing just how tough the phones are in several scenarios you may encounter on a daily basis, or not.

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IP Phone documentation is a bit scattered, and in some instances can be hard to locate.  Below is a set of links to some known documentation on different series IP Phones.  If you have additional resources on Avaya IP Phones feel free to post links in the comments section.

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MultiTech recently announced it’s latest product to help with the mobile office environment, the SIP-to-Cellular gateway.  Only offered as a GSM product, the device can provide up to two trunks of Cellular service to any SIP compliant PBX. With devices like this the possibilities are endless.  Start with simple mobile office environments.

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DEFCON 16 and Black Hat are security centric conferences recently held in Las Vegas where Aruba Networks provided the wireless infrastructure.  In a self descriptive FAQ of the environment to be expected (quoting from the FAQ site)

Q: Is there a free network at DEFCON?
A: Yes. It would be fair to describe the network as ‘hostile’. It has been described as ‘the worlds most hostile network’, but such descriptions are just attempts at flattery. It is recommended that if you want to connect to the DEFCON network pretend that you are sharing out your entire hard drive to 5,000 hackers. You may want to bring a ‘clean’ computer that you don’t mind being infected/hacked/etc…

In light of the environment Aruba reported some statistics:

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This morning Aruba issued a press release announcing that it is the first wireless LAN supplier to be awarded a Common Criteria certificate for its Wi-Fi solutions.  Common Criteria – also known as ISO standard 15408 – addresses the protection of assets from unauthorized disclosure, modification, or loss of use arising from both intentional and unintentional causes.  High security users typically require a combination of Common Criteria certification, Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 validation for cryptographic security, and compliance with Department of Defense (DoD) Directive 8100.2 security policies for wireless technologies. Aruba now satisfies all three criteria, allowing the company to meet a wide range of new domestic and international government, financial, and commercial applications.

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The Aruba Remote Access Point solution has gotten the attention of the kudos club.  The idea is simple, take a single device and plug it in to any Ethernet connection with access to the public Internet.  The Remote Access Point or RAP will find it’s way back to it’s controller, and create a secure VPN tunnel between the main site and the RAP.  The policies from the controller can also be pushed to the RAP.  This extends the corporate wireless to a very mobile, yet secure solution.

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802.11n is the new high throughput standard for wireless local area networks (WLAN).  While almost every vendor in the wireless space has released an 802.11n access point, the IEEE specification has still not been ratified.  Current timetables show that this current draft of 802.11n (currently rev 5.0) should pass all approvals and become a IEEE standard sometime this year.  The 802.11 Wireless Group has yet to place their stamp of approval on the draft, which should happen in July 08.  So why even consider 802.11n at this point?

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