AirWave Wireless of San Mateo, Calif., this week announced the latest upgrade to its AirWave Management Platform (AMP).
Version 2.4 of the software tackles something that AirWave COO Greg Murphy says customers have been asking for again and again, and that’s support for legacy access points: older products that many enterprises made significant investments in not to long ago and would still like to use.
“We’ve worked backwards to increase the depth of the support,” says Murphy. “Customers can upgrade as they want, based on their budge and needs. But with our platform, they can get use out of ORiNOCO products from back when it was still from Lucent, all the way up to the current products [from Proxim].”
The original AMP worked specifically with access points from 3eTI, Cisco, and Proxim, but recent upgrades have added support for Symbol, Enterasys, Dell, HP/Compaq, Intel and others. Just about any access point that supports Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
Murphy says the other major change is the enhanced monitoring capabilities seen in the graphical user interface (GUI) that can be accessed from any secure Web browser connection on the network.
“It shows onscreen charts of who’s associated, what bandwidth they’re using, and more, so administrators can just glance at the console and identify problems,” says Murphy.
When asked about the recent rash of WLAN switch products that’s hitting the market and if AirWave would see them as competition, Murphy said the switch vendors were more likely to eventually become partners. “They need a console that will work with their products — our vision is that if there’s hardware on the network related to RF, that’s something in our purview that we should be controlling. Long term, there’s no conflict whatsoever.”
