FEATURE IIM
Intelligent Infrastructure Management through Wi-Fi Waves of Change By Devin Akin, Chief Wi-Fi Architect, Aerohive
The primary access medium on today’s enterprise, mid-market, and small office/home office network is Wi-Fi. Anyone care to argue? We all blinked and missed the transition. It happened right before our eyes while we were standing around prophesising about how it was ‘going to happen in the future.’ Thanks Apple. We appreciate the heads-up on that. Now it has been established that
The term ‘Intelligent Infrastructure Management’ can be taken to mean different things. Here, we refer to it as
‘Intelligent Infrastructure’ and ‘Infrastructure
Management’, and discuss the role these play in solving the significant problems in today’s enterprise network.
Wi-Fi won the access layer war, we need to consider our Wi-Fi infrastructure choices. This is where we discuss ‘Intelligent Infrastructure’. After all, nothing beats a good story.
Intelligent infrastructure?
In the beginning there was the ‘Autonomous AP’ (Access Point), which was often managed individually via an internal web user interface. When end users became aware of the existence of Wi-Fi at the office, autonomous APs were quickly replicated, and well- respected network administrators were reduced to configuration monkeys. Out of necessity came wireless network management systems (WNMS) that could update all of these autonomous APs at the same time. While this solved part of the problem, there still existed the issue that you weren’t managing a system, but rather many separate APs that had no awareness of each other. This state of affairs continued for some time.
Enter controllers. Controllers were
(and still are) hardware appliances that permitted extreme acceleration of Wi-Fi within the enterprise market. This is because they enabled applications to perform in a mobile environment, just like they did on a cable, through sharing the control plane. The control plane is effectively the Wi-Fi operating system. Operations such as fast/secure roaming, radio resource management (RRM), and wireless intrusion protection (WIPS) are examples of control plane features. During the period when controllers were invented, there were very few users and very little traffic on the network, the Wi-Fi infrastructure was considered a convenience, and there were few APs deployed across the enterprise. APs were primarily in conference rooms and
22 NETCOMMS europe Volume I, Issue 6 2011
other areas where people gathered to use a computer, where cabling could become a mess. Fast forward to today. Consumer-
grade, Wi-Fi enabled devices are finding their way onto enterprise networks by the millions – the iEverything explosion. Thanks again for that heads-up, Apple. Controllers were OK for way back then, but in today’s brave new world APs must be pervasively deployed by the hundreds or even thousands, so the entire solution must be inexpensive. Downtime is unacceptable in any shape or form. Don’t believe me? Take the Wi-Fi offline, wait 60 seconds, and you’ll see what I mean. Try getting someone to pay extra for redundancy. It is impossible; the system must be inherently redundant. Bottlenecks are unacceptable. All features must be available at all times in all situations. Many clients may be attached
to a given AP simultaneously, each running applications that demand high throughput, low latency, or both. L2 and/or L3 roaming while maintaining firewall sessions with tens of megabits flowing to or from one or more clients isn’t uncommon. Does this sound easy? What I’m getting at is that today’s enterprise Wi-Fi requirements far exceed anything envisioned when controllers were invented, and the controller-based architecture cannot be hacked into keeping up with today’s, let alone tomorrow’s, demands. In 2007, Aerohive created a robust
L2 protocol suite called Cooperative Control (that runs automatically on each AP) that is responsible for all control plane operations. Moore’s Law and the 802.11n standard enabled the building of extremely fast and intelligent APs, leading to an entirely new architecture, modelled after the internet itself. Fully distributed intelligence means that all APs work together as a group (a distributed computer) to form the control plane, in the same way that all of the routers on the internet work together to form the internet. If there is a router failure on the internet, backup routers are used to route around the failure. The same is true with the company’s Wi-Fi infrastructure. The system’s intelligence
lives everywhere, so there are no single points of failure. The Ethernet is the Wi- Fi network’s backbone rather than the controller, so there are no bottlenecks. Controllers, backup controllers, controllers for additional capacity, and branch controllers are all eliminated. Less hardware means less complexity and less cost. Protocols are free.
Infrastructure management
Wi-Fi management systems have needed an overhaul as badly as architecture for some time now. With data centres being virtualised, customers wanted VMware (or similar) options for management. Coinciding with this, Managed Service Providers wanted to virtualise the management system for multiple customers. The whole world went cloud-crazy in a year. As a result, there now exist solutions which offer customers an OPEX-based, highly- available, plug-n-play management system in the cloud. In conclusion, what worked eight
years ago, four years ago, or even one year ago isn’t good enough for now, and it certainly won’t be good enough for three years from now. The infrastructure must be intelligent, adaptable, and scalable. The management system must offer the visibility, control, and flexibility that the customer demands. Solutions providers must not simply address today’s problems, but also problems that are years down the road.
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