Airmagnet Moves Inside Colubris

Continuing its efforts to put its monitoring technology inside third-party hardware, Airmagnet announced this week that it is working with Colubris to port the Airmagnet AirWISE software, used as part of the Airmagnet Enterprise distributed intrusion detection system. Colubris APs will then work as Airmagnet sensors after a software upgrade.

Carl Blume, director of product marketing at Colubris, says there will be limitations—this won’t work on older 802.11b-only equipment—but adds that “anything sold in the last year will be applicable.” He’s likely referring to the dual-radio products the company announced last year.

The company will brand this upgrade under inCharge, its name for the Colubris central management capability. Last week, the company announced a new direction toward being a WLAN switch vendor.

Blume says the Airmagnet collaboration, while initially leading to standalone support, will eventually become more integrated with the Colubris switch. “The adoption of the Airmagnet software in our product line is enabled through our intelligent architecture,” he says.

This move helps push the AirMagnet core product (the software) without requiring the separate and expensive sensors needed for monitoring the air. Rich Mironov, vice president of marketing at Airmagnet, says the original sensors would be more expensive for customers.

He adds that having fully “intelligent” APs (instead of the “thin” APs espoused by most WLAN switch vendors) helps in performance. “Many do packet forwarding, sending packets to be analyzed [centrally],” says Mironov. “That clogs the tubes, the wires, with packets that shouldn’t be moved around. It’s hard to deliver world class security that way.”

Airmagnet originally announced this strategy last December, working with chipmaker Engim at the time to make that silicon capable of working with Airmagnet Enterprise.

The Airmagnet-in-Colubris solution will be shown next week at Interop, but won’t ship until the third quarter of this year.

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