Tom: You didn't need the management capabilities of a CBW product because you had AirWave do that for you. Nothing wrong with that. It's just that most organizations prefer to use the vendor's management interface rather than a third-party one.
The first point you raise about true mobility is definitely a value-add, and achieved by the control plane. Your second point is referred to some as 'VLAN explosion'. There's no doubt, putting the data plane on the controller rather than the AP simplifies VLAN management, but there are some possible concerns in relation to latency, jitter, and the controller's ability to process all the network traffic. I say possible, because the vendors with the strongest centralized-data plane vision, namely Aruba and Cisco, will likely build whatever box necessary to switch the Gbps achievable with 802.11n and a large deployment. In regards to your third point, there's nothing inherently better about location-based services with a CBW, it's just that those vendors (Cisco, Trapeze, and Meru) have been the ones to offer it. It's the APs that capture/record the signal, so there's no reason that AirWave couldn't read those values and do the same time of LBS as anyone else. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Tom Zeller [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 11:18 PM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Advantages of Controller-based Wireless Different vendor products offer different extra gravy. But in general, I see CBW as providing only a few benefits. They are important benefits for large scale implementations, but may not be worth the additional cost for small to medium scale deployments. I see the main advantages as: 1) True mobility - If you wireless LAN is small enough to have all users on a single subnet, you have that anyway. 2) The ability to pop different groups of users onto different vlans without plumbing all those vlans to every access point. Maybe not that valuable for two VLANs and 25 APs. 3) Potential for location-based services. Not clear to me that this is really strategic rather than just "cool." I'm not sure I agree these are "must have" for smaller deployments. We did just fine with per-AP management until we were approaching 100 or so. For the most part, we didn't have to log into them all that often. However, realizing we were going to have 100s and eventually 1000s of APs we bought Airwave's AMP product, which provides an excellent central management platform for stand-alone APs (if you buy brands they support, which is most, maybe all, of the major brands). I don't see the centralized management aspect of CBW to be the driving force for us. Tom Zeller Indiana University [EMAIL PROTECTED] ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
