Tag Archives: aerohive

Extremely Hive Minded

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I must admit that I was wrong. After almost six years, I was mistake about who would end up buying Aerohive. You may recall back in 2013 I made a prediction that Aerohive would end up being bought by Dell. I recall it frequently because quite a few people still point out that post and wonder what if it’s happened yet.

Alas, June 26, 2019 is the date when I was finally proven wrong when Extreme Networks announced plans to purchase Aerohive for $4.45/share, which equates to around $272 million paid, which will be adjust for some cash on hand. Aerohive is the latest addition to the Extreme portfolio, which now includes pieces of Brocade, Avaya, Enterasys, and Motorola/Zebra.

Why did Extreme buy Aerohive? I know that several people in the industry told me they called this months ago, but that doesn’t explain the reasoning behind spending almost $300 million right before the end of the fiscal year. What was the draw that have Extreme buzzing about this particular company?

Flying Through The Clouds

The most apparent answer is HiveManager. Why? Because it’s really the only thing unique to Aerohive that Extreme really didn’t have already. Aerohive’s APs aren’t custom built. Aerohive’s switching line was rebadged from an ODM in order to meet the requirements to be included in Gartner’s Wired and Wireless Magic Quadrant. So the real draw was the software. The cloud management platform that Aerohive has pushed as their crown jewel for a number of years.

I’ll admit that HiveManager is a very nice piece of management software. It’s easy to use and has a lot of power behind the scenes. It’s also capable of being tuned for very specific vertical requirements, such as education. You can set up self-service portals and Private Pre-Shared Keys (PPSKs) fairly easily for your users. You can also build a lot of policy around the pieces of your network, both hardware and users. That’s a place to start your journey.

Why? Because Extreme is all about Automation! I talked to their team a few weeks ago and the story was all about building automation platforms. Extreme wants to have systems that are highly integrated and capable of doing things to make life easier for administrators. That means having the control pieces in place. And I’m not sure if what Extreme had already was in the same league as HiveManager. But I doubt Extreme has put as much effort into their software yet as Aerohive had invested in theirs over the past 8 years.

For Extreme to really build out the edge network of the future, they need to have a cloud-based management system that has easy policy creation and can be extended to include not only wireless access points but wired switches and other data center automation. If you look at what is happening with intent-based networking from other networking companies, you know how important policy definition is to the schema of your network going forward. In order to get that policy engine up and running quickly to feed the automation engine, Extreme made the call to buy it.

Part of the Colony

More importantly than the software piece, to me at least, is the people. Sure, you can have a bunch of people hacking away at code for a lot of hours to build something great. You can even choose to buy that something great from someone else and just start modifying it to your needs. Extreme knew that adapting HiveManager to fulfill the needs of their platform wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. So bringing the Aerohive team on board makes the most sense to me.

But it’s also important to realize who had a big hand in making the call. Abby Strong (@WiFi_Princess) is the VP of Product Marketing at Extreme. Before that she held the same role at Aerohive in some fashion for a number of years. She drove Aerohive to where they were before moving over to Extreme to do something similar.

When you’re building a team, how do you do it? Do you run out and find random people that you think are the best for the job and hope they gel quickly? Do you just throw darts at a stack of resumes and hope random chance favors your bold strategy? Or do you look at existing teams that work well together and can pull off amazing feats of technical talent with the right motivation? I’d say the third option is the most successful, wouldn’t you?

It’s not unheard of in the wireless industry for an entire team to move back and forth between companies. There’s a hospitality team that’s moved back and forth between Ruckus, Aerohive, and Ubiquiti. There are other teams, like some working on 802.11u, that bounced around a couple of times before they found a home. Which makes me wonder if Extreme bought Aerohive for HiveManager and ended up with the development team as a bonus? Or if they decided to buy the development team and got the software for “free”?

Tom’s Take

We all knew Aerohive was putting itself on the market. You don’t shed sales staff and middle management unless you’re making yourself a very attractive target for acquisition. I still held out hope that maybe Dell would come through for me and make my five-year-old prediction prescient. Instead, the right company snapped up Aerohive for next to nothing and will start in earnest integrating HiveManager into their stack in the coming months. I don’t know what the future plans for further integration look like, but the wireless world is buzzing right now and that should make life extremely sweet for the Aerohive team.

Connecting SMBs The Easy Way With Aerohive Connect

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Aerohive

Wireless is hard. When you’re putting together large deployments of access points in challenging environments with tons of security on top of it all you realize the difficulty. That’s why most major wireless deployments require a lot of time, planning, and documentation to pull off correctly. But what if things are on the small side?

A Small World Without Wires

The average small business (SMB) is stuck in a wireless limbo. They have requirements that far exceed the performance profile of standard consumer wireless devices. Most SMBs have more than three or four devices connecting at a time. They have reliability issues that need to be dealt with. And they need it all in a package that doesn’t need constant minding to work appropriately.

When you look at the market for consumer wireless today, the real push is to get rid of any configuration at all. Even the old Apple Airport, which was simplistic in its day, is too “complicate” for modern users. Solutions like Google Wifi aim to be the kind of solution that just requires a cable plugged in. No additional configuration beyond that. Which works wonders if you’re a consumer at home that needs to enable some tablets and a smart TV. But for businesses, there needs to be a level of control above that.

At the same time, wireless solutions for SMBs need to offer a limited choice of options. When you give someone a huge list of choices with no real direction on how to use them, you get something I’ve started calling Freestyle Syndrome, after the infamous Coke Freestyle machines. Too many choices cause indecision. Even Coke has finally figured this out by creating guides on the first page of the machine to guide people to Low Calorie options or Fruit Flavored drinks. They realize that the best way to give people tons of choices is to artificially limit those choices in such a way as to give the average user more direction on how to use them.

Buzzing With Opportunity

Enter the newest offering from Aerohive. Announced yesterday, Aerohive has a new 2×2:2 AP on the market, the AP 122. They are combining this new AP with a unique software offering, Aerohive Connect. Aerohive Connect solves the above issues with by providing enhanced capabilities for SMBs without overwhelming them wth pointless options.

Aerohive Connect is a version of the HiveManager software that is optimized to deliver the features that most SMBs need. Included is basic RF planning to find the best place to put your APs, guided deployment and configuration to ensure that you set those APs up correctly, and health monitoring to make sure they are working correctly into the future. You also get features to help create guest access networks to keep your traffic segmented between employees and customers.

What you don’t get with Aerohive Connect is some of the more advanced features of deploying multiple branch sites, advanced security profiles, and other advanced enterprise features of HiveManager. That’s how Aerohive is able to provide these features at a lower price point to stay attractive for SMBs.

Another thing that you won’t see from Aerohive is something common to other solutions like this. Instead of pushing you into “upgrading” to a full-featured version of the software by limiting the number of APs that can be connected, Aerohive Connect does not have a limit on the number of connected APs. You can use it with 2 APs or 25 APs with no limits. If the basic feature set is all you ever need, that’s all you’ll ever pay for. There’s no hidden uplift to recover costs, which essentially turns the SMB solution into an extended trial.

Tom’s Take

As far as solutions for SMBs go, I think Aerohive is on track with Aerohive Connect. They are giving a reduced feature offering that’s perfect for the target market with none of the traditional “gotchas” that I see from other solutions that are simply trying to upset users into a more expensive and more useless solution. Rather than trying to get the mom-and-pop convenience store chain on a full-blown enterprise wireless control system, why not target them with the best solution for them rather than a one-size-fits-all-but-not-really offering?

I think Aerohive is going to get a lot of traction with Aerohive Connect in the market. I will be curious to get an update from them in the coming months to see just how popular things have become.

Will Dell Networking Wither Away?

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The behemoth merger of Dell and EMC is nearing conclusion. The first week of August is the target date for the final wrap up of all the financial and legal parts of the acquisition. After that is done, the long task of analyzing product lines and finding a way to reduce complexity and product sprawl begins. We’ve already seen the spin out of Quest and Sonicwall into a separate entity to raise cash for the final stretch of the acquisition. No doubt other storage and compute products are going to face a go/no go decision in the future. But one product line which is in real danger of disappearing is networking.

Whither Whitebox?

The first indicator of the problems with Dell and networking comes from whitebox switching. Dell released OS 10 earlier this year as a way to capitalize on the growing market of free operating systems running on commodity hardware. Right now, OS 10 can run on Dell equipment. In the future, they are hoping to spread it out to whitebox devices. That assumes that soon you’ll see Dell branded OSes running on switches purchased from non-Dell sources booting with ONIE.

Once OS 10 pushes forward, what does that mean for Dell’s hardware business? Dell would naturally want to keep selling devices to customers. Whitebox switches would undercut their ability to offer cheap ports to customers in data center deployments. Rather than give up that opportunity, Dell is positioning themselves to run some form of Dell software on top of that hardware for management purposes, which has always been a strong point for Dell. Losing the hardware means little to Dell if they have to lose profit margin to keep it there in the first place.

The second indicator of networking issues comes from comments from Michael Dell at EMCworld this year. Check out this short video featuring him with outgoing EMC CEO Joe Tucci:

Some of the telling comments in here involve Michael Dell’s praise for the NSX business model and how it is being adopted by a large number of other vendors in the industry. Also telling is their reaffirmation that Cisco is an important partnership in VCE and won’t be going away any time soon. While these two things don’t seem to be related on the surface, they both point to a truth Dell is trying hard to accept.

In the future, with overlay network virtualization models gaining traction in the data center, the underlying hardware will matter little. In almost every case, the hardware choice will come down to one of two options:

  1. Which switch is the cheapest?
  2. Which switch is on the Approved List?

That’s it. That’s the whole decision tree. No one will care what sticker is on the box. They will only care that it didn’t cost a fortune and that they won’t get fired for buying it. That’s bad for companies that aren’t making white boxes or named Cisco. Other network vendors are going to try and add value in some way, but the overlay sitting on top of those bells and whistles will make it next to impossible to differentiate in anything but software. Whether that’s superior management capabilities, open plug-in model, or some other thing we haven’t thought of will make no difference in the end. Software will still be king and the hardware will be an inexpensive pawn or a costly piece that has been pre-approved.

Whither Wireless?

The other big inflection point that makes me worry about the Dell networking story is the lack of movement in the wireless space. Dell has historically been a company to partner first and acquire second. But with HPE’s acquisition of Aruba Networks last year, the dominos in the wireless space are still waiting to fall. Brocade raced out to buy Ruckus. Meru offered itself on a platter to anyone that would buy them. Now Aerohive stands as the last independent wireless vendor without a dance partner. Yes, they’ve announced that they are partnering with Dell, but have you been to the Dell Wireless Networking page? Can you guess what the Dell W-series is? Here’s a hint: it rhymes with “Peruba”.

Every time Dell leads with a W-series deployment, they are effectively paying their biggest competitor. They are opening the door to allowing HPE/Aruba to come in and not only start talking about wireless but servers, storage, and other networking as well. Dell would do well at this point to start deemphasizing the W-series and start highlighting the “new generation” of Aerohive APs and how they are going to the be the focus moving forward.

The real solution would be for Dell to buy a wireless company and take all the wireless expertise they are selling in-house. That would show they are serious about both the campus network of the future and the data center network needed to support their other server and storage infrastructure. Sadly, with Dell being leveraged due to the privatization of his company just two years ago and mounting debt for this mega merger, Dell is looking to make cash with spin offs instead of spending it on yet another company to ingest and subsume. Which means a real non-partner wireless solution is still many years away.

Tom’s Take

Dell’s networking strategy is in maintenance mode. Make switches to support faster speeds for now, probably with Tomahawk support soon, and hope that this whole networking thing goes software sooner rather than later. Otherwise, the need to shore up the campus wireless areas along with the coming decision about showing support fully behind NSX and partnerships is going to be a bitter pill to swallow. Perhaps Dell Networking will exist as an option for companies wanting a 100% Dell solution? Or maybe they are waiting for a new offering from Dell/EMC in the data center to drive profits to research and development to keep pace with Cisco and Arista? One can only hope that their networking flower doesn’t wither on the vine.

Could IPv6 Drown My Wireless Network?

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By now, the transition to adopt IPv6 networks is in full swing. Registrars are running out of prefixes and new users overseas are getting v6-only allocations for new circuits. Mobile providers are going v6-only and transition mechanisms are in place to ease the migration. You can hear about some of these topics in this recent roundtable recorded at Interop last week:

One of the converstaions that I had with Ed Horley (@EHorley) during Interop opened my eyes to another problem that we will soon be facing with IPv6 and legacy technology. Only this time, it’s not because of a numbering scheme. It’s because of old hardware.

Rate Limited

Technology always marches on. Things that seemed magical to us just five years ago are now antiquated and slow. That’s the problem with the original 802.11 specification. It supported wireless data rates at a paltry 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps. When 802.11b was released, it raised the rates to 5.5 Mbps and 11 Mbps. Those faster data rates, combined with a larger coverage area, helped 802.11b become commercially successful.

Now, we have 802.11n with data rates in the hundreds of Mbps. We also have 802.11ac right around the corner with rates approaching 1 Gbps. It’s a very fast wireless world. But thanks to the need to be backwards compatible with existing technology, even those fast new 802.11n access points still support the old 1 & 2 Mbps data rates of 802.11. This is great if you happen to have a wireless device from the turn of the millenium. It’s not so great if you are a wireless engineer supporting such an installation.

Wireless LAN professionals have been talking for the past couple of years about how important it is to disable the 1, 2, and 5.5 Mbps data rates in your wireless networks. Modern equipment will only utilize those data rates when far away from the access point and modern design methodology ensures you won’t be far from an access point. Removing support for those devices forces the hardware to connect at a higher data rate and preserve the overall air quality. Even one 802.11b device connecting to your wireless network can cause the whole network to be dragged down to slow data rates. How important is it to disable these settings? Meraki’s dashboard allows you to do it with one click:

MerakiDataRates

Flood Detected

How does this all apply to IPv6? Well, it turns out that that multicast has an interesting behavior on wireless networks. It seeks out the lowest data rate to send traffic. This ensures that all recievers get the packet. I asked Matthew Gast (@MatthewSGast) of Aerohive about this recently. He said that it’s up to the controller manufacturer to decide how multicast is handled. When I gave him an inquisitive look, he admitted that many vendors leave it up to the lowest common denominator, which is usually the 1 Mbps or 2 Mbps data rate.

This isn’t generally a problem. IPv4 multicast tends to be sporadic and short-lived at best. Most controllers have mechanisms in place for dealing with this, either by converting those multicasts to unicasts or by turning off mulitcast completely. A bit of extra traffic on the low data rates isn’t noticeable.

IPv6 has a much higher usage of multicast, however. Router Advertisements (RAs) and Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) are crictical to the operation of IPv6. So critical, in fact, that turning off Global Multicast on a Cisco wireless controller doesn’t disable RAs and MLD from happening. You must have multicast running for IPv6.

What happens when all that multicast traffic from IPv6 hits a controller with the lower data rates enable? Gridlock. Without vendor intervention the MLD and RA packets will hop down to the lowest data rate and start flooding the network. Listeners will respond on the same low data rate and drag the network down to an almost-unusable speed. You can’t turn off the multicast to fix it either.

The solution is to prevent this all in the first place. You need to turn off the 802.11b low data rates on your controller. 1 Mbps, 2 Mbps, and 5.5 Mbps should all be disabled, both as a way to prevent older, slower clients from connecting to your wireless network and to keep newer clients running IPv6 from swamping it with multicast traffic.

There may still be some older clients out there that absolutely require 802.11b data rates, like medical equipment, but the best way to deal with these problematic devices is isolation. These devices likely won’t be running IPv6 any time in the future. Isolating them onto a separate SSID running the 802.11b data rates is the best way to ensure they don’t impact your other traffic. Make sure you read up on how to safely disable data rates and do it during a testing window to ensure you don’t break everything in the world. But you’ll find your network much more healthy when you do.

Tom’s Take

Legacy technology support is critical for continued operation. We can’t just drop something because we don’t want to deal with it any more. Anyone who has ever called a technical support line feels that pain. However, when the new technology doesn’t feasably support working with older tech, it’s time to pull the plug. Whether it be 802.11b data rates or something software related, like dropping PowerPC app support in OS X, we have to keep marching forward to make new devices run at peak performance.

IPv6 has already exposed limitations of older technologies like DHCP and NAT. Wireless thankfully has a much easier way to support transitions. If you’re still running 802.11b data rates, turn them off. You’ll find your IPv6 transition will be much less painful if you do. And you can spend more time working with tech and less time trying to tread water.

 

HP Is Buying Aruba. Who’s Next?

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Sometimes all it takes is a little push. Bloomberg reported yesterday that HP is in talks to buy Aruba Networks for their wireless expertise. The deal is contingent upon some other things, and the article made sure to throw up disclaimers that it could still fall through before next week. But the people that I’ve talked to (who are not authorized to comment and wouldn’t know the official answer anyway) have all said this is a done deal. We’ll likely hear the final official confirmation on Monday afternoon, ahead of Aruba’s big Atmosphere (nee Airheads) conference.

R&D Through M&A

This is a shot in the arm for HP. Their Colubris-based AP lineup has been sorely lacking in current generation wireless technology, let alone next gen potential. The featured 802.11ac APs on their networking site are OEMed directly from Aruba. They’ve been hoping to play the OEM game for a while and see where the chips are going to fall. Buying Aruba gives them second place in the wireless market behind Cisco overnight. It also fixes the most glaring issue with Colubris – R&D. HP hasn’t really been developing their wireless portfolio. Some had even thought it was gone for good. This immediately puts them back in the conversation.

More importantly to HP, this acquisition cuts off many of their competitor’s wireless plans at the knees. Dell, Juniper, Brocade, Alcatel Lucent, and many others OEM from Aruba or have a deep partnership agreement. By wrapping up the entirety of Aruba’s business, HP has dealt a blow to the single-source vendors that are playing in the wireless market. And this is going to lead to some big changes relatively soon.

The Startup Buzz

Dell is perhaps the most impacted by this announcement. A very large portion of their wireless offerings were Aruba. They sold APs, controllers, and even ClearPass through their channels (with the names filed off, of course). Now, they are back to square one. How are they going to handle the most recent deals? What are their support options?

I little thought exercise with my friend Josh Williams (@JSW_EdTech) had a few possibilities:

  1. Dell forces HP to buyout all the support contracts for Dell/Aruba customers. That makes sense for Dell, but it will turn a lot of customers against them, especially when HP lets those customers know the reasons why.
  2. Dell agrees to release the developments they’ve done on the platform to HP in return for HP taking the support business. Quiet and clean. Which is why it likely won’t happen.
  3. Dell pays HP an exorbitant amount of money to take the support contracts. This gives HP the capital to take on all those new support contracts and gives Dell an exit to rebuild. This is probably what HP wants, but could end up sinking the deal.

Dell got burned, plain and simple. They likely could have purchased Aruba months ago and solidified the relationship. Instead, they are now looking for a new partner. However, I don’t think they are going to get burned again. Rather than shopping for a friend, they are going to be shopping for an acquisition. My money has always been on Aerohive. They have an existing relationship. The Aerohive controller-less cloud model fits Dell’s new strategies. And they would be a much cheaper pickup than Aruba. There is precedence for Dell skipping the big name and picking up a smaller company that’s a better fit. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but it gives Dell the chance to move forward with a lasting relationship.

Softwarely Defined

Brocade is a line-of-business partner of Aruba. They’ve only recently gotten involved since Motorola shut down their WLAN business. This is a good sign for them. That means they can exit from their position and not be significantly affected. It does leave them with a quandary of where to go.

The first choice would be to go back to the Motorola relationship, now in the form of Zebra Technologies. Zebra inherited quite a large portion of the WLAN space from Motorola, but they’ve been keeping rather quiet about it. Are they angling to be more of a support organization for existing installs? Or are they waiting for a big splash announcement to get back in the game? Partnering with Brocade would give them that announcement given the elevated profile Brocade has today.

Brocade’s other option would be to go down the SDN road. The plan for a while has been to embrace SDN, OpenFlow, and all things software defined. The natural target for this would be Meru Networks. Meru has been embracing SDN as well as of late. They had a nice event last year showcasing their advances in SDN. Brocade could bolster that SDN knowledge while obtaining a good wireless company that would give them the strength they need to augment their enterprise business.

Permission To Retire

The odd company out is Juniper. I’ve heard that they were involved at first in trying to acquire Aruba, but when you’re betting against HP’s pockets you will lose in the long run. Their other problem is Elliott Management, everyone’s new favorite “activist investor”.

Elliott has made no secret that they see the value in Juniper in the service provider market. As far back as last year, Elliott has been trying to get Juniper to reave off the ancillary businesses, including security, enterprise, and wireless. Juniper has officially ended sales for Trapeze-based products already. Why would Elliott let them buy another wireless company so soon after getting rid of the last one. Even as successful as Aruba is, Elliott would see it as another distraction. And when someone that active is calling the shots, you can’t go against them, lest you end up unemployed.

This is the end for Juniper’s wireless aspirations. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. This gives them the impetus needed to focus on the service provider market. It also gives them a smaller enterprise switching portfolio to package up and sell off should that pound of flesh be necessary to sate Elliott as well. Time will tell.

Everyone Else

Any other companies with Aruba relationships are either dipping their toes in the wireless waters or don’t care enough to worry about the impact it will have. It will be an easy matter for companies like Alcatel-Lucent to go out and find a new OEM partner, likely with someone like Extreme Networks or Ruckus. Those companies are making great technology and will be happy to supply the APs that customers need. Showing off their technology will also give them great in-roads into customers that might not have been on their radar before.

Tom’s Take

It’s going to be an exciting time in the wireless space. HP’s acquisition is going to start the falling dominoes for other companies to buy into the wireless space as well. When the dust settles, there will be new number twos and number threes in the market. It also clears the middle of the space for up-and-comers to grow. Cisco is going to stay number one for a while, and HP will be number two when this deal closes. But until we see the fallout from who will be purchased and partnered with it’s tough to say who will be a clear winner. But make sure you’ve got your popcorn ready. Because this isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

 

Will Dell Buy Aerohive?

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One rumor I keep hearing about in the industry involves a certain buzzing wireless vendor and the world’s largest startup.  Acquisitions happen all the time.  Rumors of them are even more frequent.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this may be good for everyone.

Dell wants to own the stack from top to bottom.  In the past, they have had to partner with printer companies (Lexmark) and networking companies (Brocade and Juniper) to deliver parts of the infrastructure they couldn’t provide themselves.  In the case of printers, Dell found a way to build them on their own.  That reduced their reliance on Lexmark.  In the networking world, Dell shocked everyone by going outside their OEM relationship and buying Force10.  I’ve talked before about why the Force10 pickup was a better deal in the long run than Brocade.

Dell’s Desires

Dell needs specific pieces of the puzzle.  They don’t want to be encumbered with ancillary products that will need to be jettisoned later.  Buying Brocade would have required unwinding a huge fibre channel business.  In much the same way, I don’t think Dell will end up buying their current wireless OEM, Aruba Networks.  Aruba has decided to branch out past the doing simple wireless and moved into wired network switches and security and identity management programs like ClearPass.  Dell doesn’t want any of that.  They already have an issue integrating the Force10 networking expertise into the PowerConnect line.  I’ve been told in the past the FTOS will eventually come to PowerConnect, but that has yet to happen.  Integrating purchased companies isn’t easier.  That becomes exponentially harder the more product lines you have to integrate.

Aruba is too expensive for Dell to buy outright.  Michael Dell spent a huge chunk of his cash to get his company back from the shareholders.  He’s going to put it on a diet pretty soon.  I would expect to see a few product lines slimmed down or outright dropped.  That makes it tough to justify buying so much from another company.  Dell needs a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.

Aerohive’s Aspirations

Aerohive is the best target for Dell.  They are clearly fighting for third place in the wireless market behind Cisco and Aruba.  Aerohive has never been shy about punching above their weight.  They have the mentality of a scrappy terrier that won’t go down without a fight.  But, they are getting pressure to expand quickly across their product lines.  They took their time releasing an 802.11ac access point.  Their switching offering hasn’t caught on in the same way that of Aruba or Meraki (now a division of Cisco).

Aerohive is on the verge of going public.  I’m sure the infusion of cash would allow them to pay off some early investors as well as fund more development for 802.11ac Phase 2 gear and maybe a firewall offering.  The risk comes when you look at what happened to Ruckus Wireless shortly after their IPO.  While they did recover, it didn’t look very good for a company that supposedly did have a unique claim, their antenna design.  Aerohive is a cloud management platform like many others in the market.  You have to wonder how investors would view them.  Scrappy doesn’t sell stock.

Aerohive is now fighting in the new Gartner “Wired and Wireless Access” magic quadrant, which is an absolute disaster for everyone.  An analyst firm thinks that wireless is just like wired, so naturally it makes sense for AP vendors to start making switches, right?  Except the people who are really brilliant when it comes to wireless, like Matthew Gast and Victor Shtrom couldn’t care less about bits on copper.  They’ve spent the better part of their careers solving the RF problems in the world.  And now someone tells them that interference problems aren’t that much different than spanning tree?  I would have long since planted my head permanently onto my desk if I’d been told that in their position.

Aerohive gains a huge backer in the fight if Dell acquires them.  They get the name to go up against Cisco/Meraki.  The gain R&D from Dell with expertise around cloud management.  They can start developing integration with HiveManager and Dell’s SMB extensive product line.  Switch supply becomes a thing of the past.  Their entire software offering fits well with what Dell is trying to accomplish from a device independence perspective with regards to customers.

Tom’s Take

I don’t put much stock in random rumors.  But I’ve heard this one come up enough to make me ask some tough questions.  There are people in both camps that think it will happen sometime in 2014.  Dell has to get the books sorted out and figure out who’s in charge of buying things.  Aerohive has to see if there’s enough juice left in the market to IPO and not look foolish.  Maybe Dell needs to run the numbers and find out what it would take to cash out Aerohive’s investors and add the company to the growing Empire of Round Rock.  A little buzz for the World’s Largest Startup couldn’t hurt.

A Complicated World Without Wires

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Another Field Day is in the books. Wireless Field Day 5 was the first that I’d been to in almost two years. I think that had more to do with the great amount of talent that exists in the wireless space. Of course, it does help that now I’m behind the scenes and not doing my best to drink from the firehose of 802.11ac transitions and channel architecture discussions. That’s not to say that a few things didn’t absorb into my head.

Analysis is King

I’ve seen talks from companies like Fluke and Metageek before at Wireless Field Day. It was a joy to see them back again for more discussion about new topics. For Fluke, that involved plans to include 802.11ac in their planning and analysis tools. This is going to be important going forward to help figure out the best way to setup new high-speed deployments. For Metageek, it was all about showing us how they are quickly becoming the go-to folks for packet analysis and visual diagramming. Cisco has tapped them to provide analysis for CleanAir. That’s pretty high praise indeed. Their EyePA tool is an amazing peek into what’s possible when you take the torrent of data provided by wireless connections and visualize it.

Speaking of analytics, I was very impressed to see what 7signal and WildPackets were pulling out of the air. WildPackets is also using a tool to capture 802.11ac traffic, OmniPeek. A lot of the delegates were happy to see that 11ac had been added in the most recent release. 7signal has some crazy sensors that they can deploy into your environment to give you a very accurate picture of what’s going on. As the CTO, Veli-Pekka Ketonen told me, “You can hope for about 5% assurance when you just walk around and measure manually. We can give you 95% consistently.”

It’s Not Your AP, It’s How You Use It

The other thing that impressed me from the Wireless Field Day 5 sponsors was the ways in which APs were being used. Aerohive took their existing AP infrastructure and started adding features like self-registration guest portals. I loved that you could follow a Twitter account and get your guest PPSK password via DM. It just shows the power of social media when it interacts with wireless. AirTight took the social integration to an entirely different level. They are leveraging social accounts through Facebook and Twitter to offer free guest wifi access. In a world where free wifi is assumed to be a given, it’s nice to see vendors figuring out how to make social work for them with likes and follows in exchange for access.

That’s not to say that software was king of the hill. Xirrus stepped up to the the stage for a first-time appearance at Wireless Field Day. They have a very unique architecture, to say the least. Their CEO weathered the questions from the delegates and live viewers quite well compared to some of the heat that I’ve seen put on Xirrus in the past. I think the delegates came away from the event with a greater respect for what Xirrus is trying to do with their array architecture. Meru also presenter for the first time and talked about their unique perspective with an architecture based on using single-channel APs to alleviate issues in the airspace. I think their story has a lot to do with specific verticals and challenging environments, as outlined by Chris Carey from Bellarmine College, who spoke about his experiences.

If you’d like to watch the videos from Wireless Field Day 5, you can see them on Youtube or Vimeo.  You can also read through the delegates thoughts at the Wireless Field Day 5 page.

Tom’s Take

Wireless growing by leaps and bounds. It’s no longer just throwing up a couple of radio bridges and offering a network to a person or two with laptops in your environment. The interaction of mobility and security have led to dense deployments with the need to keep tabs on what the users are doing through analytics like those provided by Meru and Motorola. We’ve now moved past focusing on protocols like 802.11ac and instead on how to improve the lives of the users via guest registration portals and self enrollment like Aerohive and AirTight. And we can’t forget that the explosion of wireless means we need to be able to see what’s going on, whether it be packet capture or airspace monitoring. I think the group at Wireless Field Day 5 did an amazing job of showing how mature the wireless space has become in such as short time. I am really looking forward to what Wireless Field Day 6 will bring in 2014.

Disclaimer

Wireless Field Day 5 doesn’t happen without the help of the sponsors. They each cover a portion of the travel and lodging costs of the delegates. Some even choose to provide takeaways like pens, coffee mugs, and even evaluation equipment. That doesn’t mean that they are “buying” a review. No Wireless Field Day delegate is required to write about what they see. If they do choose to write, they don’t have to write a positive review. Independence means no restrictions. No sponsor every asks for consideration in a review and they are never promised anything. What you read from myself and the delegates is their honest and uninfluenced opinion.

Aerohive Is Switching Things Up

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I’ve had the good fortune to be involved with Aerohive Networks ever since Wireless Field Day 1.  Since then, I’ve been present for their launch of branch routing.  I’ve also convinced the VAR that I work for to become a partner with them, as I believe that their solutions in the wireless space are of great benefit to my customer base.  It wasn’t long ago that some interesting rumors started popping up.  I noticed that Aerohive started putting out feelers to hire a routing and switching engineer.  There was also a routing and switching class that appeared in the partner training list.  All of these signs pointed to something abuzz on the horizon.

Today, Aerohive is launching a couple of new products.  The first of these is the aforementioned switching line.  Aerohive is taking their expertise in HiveOS and HiveManager and placing it into a rack with 24 cables coming out of it.  The idea behind this came when they analyzed their branch office BR100 and BR200 models and found that a large majority of their remote/branch office customers needed more than the 4 switch ports offered in those models.  Aerohive had a “ah ha” moment and decided that it was time to start making enterprise-grade switches.  The beauty of having a switch offering from a company like Aerohive is that the great management software that is already available for their existing products is now available for wired ports as well.  All of the existing polices that you can create through HiveManager can now be attached to an Aerohive switch port.  The GUI for port role configuration is equally nice:

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In addition, the management dashboard has been extended and expanded to allow for all kinds of information to be pulled out of the network thanks to the visibility that HiveManager has.  You can also customize these views to your heart’s content.  If you frequently find yourself needing to figure out who is monopolizing your precious bandwidth, you’ll be happy with the options available to you.

The first of three switch models, the SR2024, is available today.  It has 24 GigE ports, 8 PoE+ ports, 4 GigE uplinks, and a single power supply.  In the coming months, there will be two additional switches that have full PoE+ capability across 24 and 48 ports, redundant power supplies, and 10 GigE SFP+ uplinks.  For those that might be curious, I asked Abby Strong about the SFPs, and Aerohive will allow you to use just about anyone’s SFPs.  I think that’s a pretty awesome idea.

The other announcement from Aerohive is software based.  One of the common things that is seen in today’s wireless networks is containment of application traffic via multiple SSIDs. If you’ve got management users as well as end users and guests accessing your network all at once, you’ve undoubtedly created policies that allow them to access information differently.  Perhaps management has unfettered access to sites like Facebook while end users can only access it during break hours.  Guests are able to go where they want but are subject to bandwidth restrictions to prevent them from monopolizing resources.  In the past you would need three different SSIDs to accomplish something like this.  Having a lot of broadcasted SSIDs causes a lot of wireless congestion as well as user confusion and increased attack surface.  If only there was a way to have visibility into the applications that the users are accessing and create policies and actions based on that visibility.

Aerohive is also announcing application visibility in the newest HiveOS and HiveManager updates.  This allows administrators to peer deeply into the applications being used by users on the network and create policies on a per-user basis to allow or restrict them based on various criteria.  These policies follow the user through the network up to and including the branch office.  Later in the year, Aerohive will port these policies to their switching line.  However, when you consider that the majority of the users today are using mobile devices first and foremost, this is where the majority of the visibility needs to be.  Administrators can provide user-based controls and reporting to identify bandwidth hogs and take appropriate action to increase bandwidth for critical applications on the fly.  This allows for the most flexibility for both users and administrators.  In truth, it’s all the nice things about creating site-wide QoS policies without all the ugly wrench turning involved with QoS.  How could you not want that?

Tom’s Take

Aerohive’s dip into the enterprise switching market isn’t all that shocking.  They seem to be taking a page from Meraki and offering their software platform on a variety of hardware.  This is great for most administrators because once you’ve learned the software interface and policy creation, porting it between wired switch ports and wireless APs is seemless.  That creates an environment focused on solving problems with business decisions, not on problems with configuration guides.  The Aerohive switches are never going to outperform a Nexus 7000 or a Catalyst 4500.  For what they’ve been designed to accomplish in the branch office, however, I think they’ll fit the bill just fine.  And that’s something to be buzzing about.

Disclaimer

Aerohive provided a briefing about the release of these products.  I spoke with Jenni Adair and Abby Strong.  At no time did Aerohive or their representatives ask for any consideration in the writing of this post, nor were they assured of any of the same.  All of the analysis and opinions represented herein are mine and mine alone.

Aerohive HiveOS 4

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Aerohive really stood out to me at Wireless Tech Field Day back in March.  They’re a great company with a lot of interesting ideas behind wireless technology today that run counter to what you are hearing from the mainstream vendors.  The most perpendicular of these is that having a controller-based wireless network is no longer the way to go now that the processing power of access points (APs) has caught up to the modern era.  You can still have a software program directing their configuration and provisioning, but needed to run all that traffic through a centralized box is just asking for trouble.  Accordingly, Aerohive is coming out with some updates to their software offerings.

Aerohive announced the newest release of their HiveOS, version 4.0.  To go along with it, they are also releasing a new version of their HiveManager software, 4.0 as well.  The folks at Aerohive let me take a sneak peak at the bells and whistles on their new products.  The idea behind HiveOS 4 and HiveManager 4 is the ability to simplify the configuration of the network for guest users and mobile devices.  The current trend in wireless technology today is moving away from providing your employees with corporate mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, and instead configuring your network to allow more of a Bring Your Own Mobile Device approach.  From the CxO’s new iPad to a Galaxy Tab 10.1, the landscape of wireless client devices is proliferating quickly.  One of the areas where Aerohive told me they are seeing this explosion of BYOMD is in the healthcare industry.  With so many doctors and specialists floating in and out of hospitals, the number of different devices hopping on the wireless network at any given time is staggering.  Add in the patients and their families and loved ones and you can see how crazy things can get at times.  As a network admin, you can’t just tell all those people that they are only allowed to get on your network if they use the right device.  Doctors, in particular, become very attached to their mobile device and would prefer taking it around to each site they visit rather than be issued an “approved” mobile device upon arrival.  It becomes more important then to configure your wireless in such as way to provide the best experience for your users while at the same time protecting them and protecting the network from harm.

One way that Aerohive is helping this guest device explosion is by offering the ability to have your users self enroll on a portal page for a Private Pre-Shared Key (PPSK).  I like the idea of a PPSK, since it essentially provides a throw-away password for each user and allows you to grant access without giving away the whole network.  This also does away with any kind of need to have an open guest network, which has been shown in recent months to be vulnerable to all kinds of snooping and sniffing software, such as the infamous Firesheep.  In HiveOS 4, you can also tag those PPSKs with an expiration time and date, so for instance the network admins at a concert performance or sporting event can mark all the self-generated PPSKs to expire two hours after the end of the show to help prevent people from leeching the network forever.  This can help you setup easy access for your clients to generate their own PPSKs via a web portal so the admins need not get involved in the process while at the same time making sure that you can restrict access should the need arise.  If you have a user that is misbehaving or needs to be disconnected, you merely disable their PPSK without needing to rekey the network.  This feature is also a great idea in places where employee turnover is rather high.

Another new feature in HiveOS 4 is the ability to snoop on mobile Internet devices, or MIDs as Aerohive refers to them.  Every mobile device you can buy today identifies itself in one form or another.  Most of the time this is done via browser user agents.  As a quick example, the user agent on your iPhone announces to the website that it is indeed a Fruit Company Mobile Phone, and the website displays a mobile-friendly site with larger text and fewer graphics.  In much the same way, HiveOS 4 allows the network to determine which devices are being used  and restrict them with policies.  For instance, you may want to give your CxO unfettered access to all corporate resources on his laptop.  If he uses his iPad, you may want to restrict him from accessing servers which don’t support his tablet.  If he jumps on with his iPhone, you may wish to further restrict him to Internet access only.  By snooping on the user agents, you can configure these policies quickly and easily without restricting access on his other devices.  Think of a restaurant, for example.  The host/hostess up front would love to use an iPad to take reservations quickly and easily, but the management is worried they might instead use it to surf the web or spend more time on Facebook than face-to-face with customers.  In HiveOS 4, you can restrict the host station iPads from the Internet and only allow them access to the reservation system.  A win for everyone that is interested in things other than status updates.  Note that this is all done without the need to enable 802.1x authentication on the network, a very time consuming and hairy process for even the most seasoned security and network people.

One unexpected addition in HiveOS 4 is spectrum analysis.  Cisco has really been pushing the advantages of the Cognio chip embedded in all of it’s 3500 series APs.  When we asked Aerohive about doing spectrum analysis in their APs at WFD, the answer was “wait and see”.  I’m pleased to announce that with HiveOS 4, you can now enable a spectrum analyzer in your Aerohive 802.11n APs.  The interface in HiveManager 4 is all based on HTML5, so it has no display issues on your favorite Fruit Company Mobile Device.  There is a large signature database included, so you can plot the air waves and then compare them to a list of known interference sources in case you aren’t sure whether it’s a Bluetooth headset or a cordless phone causing interference.  This is great if you want to enable the spectrum analyzer on a remote AP and then have someone back at the office check the interference source while you walk around trying to find out who’s hiding a microwave under their desk (Here’s a tip:  Look for the guy glowing in the dark…).  This feature is included in HiveOS 4 at no additional cost.  One caveat I noticed – HiveManager can only receive data from 10 spectrum analysis sources at once, so you can’t configure any more than that.  When I asked about this limitation, I was informed that in order to receive and process the data quickly and efficiently, they had to put a limit on it, so 10 is it.  For now, at least.

HiveOS 4 Spectrum Analysis running on your favorite Fruit Company Tablet

For those of you out there that may be Aerohive partners, there is also a new Partner Admin page that allows you to demo the product and set up customer evaluations.  You can also remote in and add devices to your customer’s network or even delegate certain tasks to administrators at the customer site.  This is a great addition for those providers looking to add Aerohive as a kind of managed services wireless solution.  For one low monthly fee, you can lease Aerohive gear to your customers and manage it from one location.  You can involve the customer admins as little or as much as you want.

There are a lot of other great features that are in HiveOS 4 and HiveManager 4, so you should head over to Aerohive’s site and check it out.  The upgrade is free for all existing Aerohive customers and will be available on June 20.

Tom’s Take

I like what Aerohive is doing with their approach to wireless.  By moving the intelligence of the network out into the access points, they alleviate some of the bottleneck issues with controllers.  They also have some great ideas that they bring to the table to increase the visibility of their software with certain verticals, such as education and health care.  However, if software is your game, you’re only as good as the features in your latest release.  I think Aerohive nailed it with HiveOS 4.  They’ve added a lot of new features to help admins address their pain points in the Bring Your Own Mobile Device era, as well as adding a much-needed feature that will allow them to compete with offerings from Cisco in the spectrum analysis arena.  By making this upgrade available for all existing customers, you can refresh your wireless network with the click of a button.  No forklifts needed.  So join me in raising a glass to the latest release of HiveOS:

I look forward to seeing more good stuff from Aerohive in the future.

Disclaimer

I received a sneak peak at the offering from Aerohive before the launch date.  No consideration was asked for in my attendance, and none was offered.  The opinions and analysis offered in this post are mine and mine alone.