Tech Field Day

CTS 116: Aruba Atmosphere 2018

April 9, 2018 Rowell Podcast 00:30:13 0 Comments

Robert Boardman joins the show to share his experience as a first-time attendee at Aruba Atmosphere.

Aruba Atmosphere 2018

Aruba Atmosphere 2018

Hosted at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Aruba Atmosphere packed in about 3000 wireless professionals for a great conference. Robert Boardman joins the show to share his experience in attending for the first time.

Robert describes Atmosphere as being different compared to the giant conferences. It’s highly focused on wireless. There aren’t a lot of vendors, probably less than 20 of them.

The best part of Aruba Atmosphere were the sessions. You learn so much about Aruba’s solutions and you get to see what’s coming out soon.

A favorite session of Robert’s was Nuts and Bolts of Wireless by Eric Johnson. If you have an Airheads account, be sure to check this session out if it becomes available.

Aruba brought out NetInsights which is their machine learning and AI platform which helps provide the network administrator with data-driven action items. Data is pulled from the access point and different metrics can be gathered such as performance anomalies, performance of clients, and performance of access points. It will also provide some configuration optimization recommendations.

Also at Aruba Atmosphere was Tech Field Day covering the event. They hosted a panel of delegates fielding questions from the audience on three big topics. The session was moderated by Tom Hollingsworth. Check out the recording of Tech Field Day.

 

 

The big news from Aruba Networks was their intent to acquire Cape Networks. We see this tying into NetInsights but time will tell how it will get integrated into Aruba.

 

Links and Resources

Mojo Networks access point

CTS 089: Mojo Networks & The Client Journey at MFD2

August 21, 2017 Rowell Podcast 00:48:58 0 Comments

We provide our thoughts on Mojo Networks presenting at Mobility Field Day 2.

Mojo Networks

Mobility Field Day 2 went live with Mojo Networks on July 25th, 2017. We visited their offices in Mountain View to see what was new with Mojo Networks.

First up on the agenda, CEO Rick Wilmer, talks about Mojo Networks’ participation in the Open Compute Project. Their goal is to bring Open Standards to access points. It’s a way for companies to use a vendor’s firmware on any access point hardware. It’s an interesting project because it would dramatically reduce costs of access points making it go the way of servers. There’s still plenty of work to be done but we should check in on the status often.

The newest feature of Mojo Networks is Mojo Aware. A way to gain visibility into the client journey. It’s all about the user experience. We got insight into association and authentication statistics, baselines for the wireless network, and average statistics of the clients using your network. It seems like major vendors are adding this point of view into their products.

Other topics we discuss on the episode:

  • Mojo Packets
  • Mojo Network’s 3rd radio

Links & Resources

Dashboard title of Cape Networks

CTS 088: Cape Networks At MFD2

August 14, 2017 Rowell Podcast 00:46:07 1 Comment

We recap the presentation Cape Networks provided during Mobility Field Day 2. It aired live on July 26th, 2017.

This episode is sponsored by Metageek

Sponsored by Metageek

Cape Networks at MFD2

A company was born a little over 3 years ago. Their goal, to help network admins and MSPs to enable a great experience on their networks. But how exactly do you do that? They began creating a sensor that would be placed near the end users to collect metrics on the quality of the wireless network. That data would be analyzed in their cloud and presented in a simple user interface of red, yellow, and green lights.

All to answer a fundamental question: how good is my network?

The team hand humble beginnings, learning how to make hardware at scale. They moved to Silicon Valley to get funding for their idea and now they have their sensors across the globe.

It was really great to hear the story of how they began to growing to where they are now. They have really made a big achievement.

During Mobility Field Day 2, they announced new features to further enhance the capabilities of their wireless sensors. This includes:

  • Rolling packet capture
  • Splash Page Support

Listen to the episode for our recap of the presentation and watch the videos from Mobility Field Day 2 below.

The Cape Networks team photo

The internal board of a Cape Sensor

Links and Resources

CTS 051: Aruba Networks at Mobility Field Day Live

September 26, 2016 Rowell Podcast 00:30:57 0 Comments

Aruba Networks, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, hosts Mobility Field Day Live at their EBC in Sunnyvale to talk about their Mobile First Platform announcement of Aruba OS 8.

On September 12th, 2016 Aruba Networks introduced their Mobile First Platform. A platform in which improves upon mobile users’ wireless experience. They’ve really put a lot into developing Aruba OS 8 with extensions to an ecosystem of partners.

Aruba Networks went into great detail of the features being implemented with Aruba OS 8, their new operating system.

Campus WLAN Foundation

Aruba Networks has implemented features customers have been asking for. Features that make it simpler to manage large scale networks.

Introducing the Mobility Master which can be deployed as a VM or a physical appliance. With the flexibility of a VM, engineers can utilize existing infrastructure and if needed, add more CPU, memory, and storage without running into appliance limitations.

A favorite feature of mine with Aruba OS 8 is the ability to terminate different SSIDs on the same AP to different controllers. A lot of flexibility and security using this method. Definitely eliminating restrictions on traditional WLANs.

Going into operations, Aruba Networks introduces zero touch provisioning of new controllers. Controllers can find the mobility master, making it easier on operations.

With the mobility master, it can manage different versions of firmware as long as it is running the latest version. But because the mobility master is not in the data path you won’t see the network go down during an upgrade. With the ability to manage different versions of firmware, you’re allowed to test the latest version on one controller rather than deploying it to all controllers at the same time.

Multizone

For those requiring multi-tenancy, this feature is a huge benefit. The traditional model had access points terminating at a single controller. In Aruba OS 8, different WLANs on the same AP can terminate to different controllers. You now have complete security separation between WLANs and a benefit of not having to install multiple APs for security purposes. This removes the headaches of management and cleans up the RF environment. Read More

Top 5 Episodes

CTS 086: Capacity Planner, Ubiquiti and Fedex Forum

CTS 064: Wi-Fi Roundtable 1 – Part 1

CTS 052: How To Validate Wi-Fi Infrastructure

CTS 084: Channel Widths with Devin Akin

CTS 062: K12 Wi-Fi Deployments with Jim Vajda