Wireless LAN Solutions

Wireless

Wireless LAN solutions are designed to remove the complexity from wireless details.

Today's leading enterprises know that mobility drives productivity, cost savings, and greater customer satisfaction. Mission-critical wireless applications are being deployed in hospitals, retail environments, manufacturing and distribution, educational facilities, as well as in corporate conference room and offices. Wireless devices range from laptops to scanner guns, to latency-sensitive Voice over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN) handsets. Each type of device provides installation, performance, security, and management challenges. To compound the challenge, resource-constrained IT departments do not have the luxury to hire dedicated resources for wireless support.

Extreme Networks® addresses these challenges with wireless solutions that offer installation and operational simplicity, highly-scalable performance, and essential wireless and wired security. These solutions are designed to remove the administrative complexity from wireless details such as Radio Frequency (RF) eccentricities, wireless Quality of Service (QoS) and security. Installation is easy and enterprise-grade reliability helps ensure that IT managers do not get wireless support calls in the middle of the night.

Products

Wireless

The Summit® WM3000 series controllers provide a scalable, high-performance Wireless LAN (WLAN) solution that is easy to use and offers robust security features. In today’s enterprise environments, dedicated resources are rarely available to build and operate the wireless network. By focusing on ease of installation and management, the Summit wireless mobility solution from Extreme Networks enables IT organizations to simplify the task of mobilizing their users without compromising security or performance. Summit WM series controllers are ready to support the most advanced wireless applications. With the capability to support high-speed, cross-subnet roaming and sophisticated multicast support, Summit WM series controllers can meet nearly any mobile voice or multimedia networking challenge. Summit WM3000 series controllers can scale to support the largest WLAN installations while providing centralized management for remote office installations.

Summit WM3600 controller can support 2,000 to 20,000 mobile devices and manage up to 256 access points (APs). It includes a user accessible ExpressCard™ Slot that is capable of hosting a broadband card (3G/4G) for a redundant wireless WAN backhaul connection, providing a truly self-sustainable wireless enterprise. Summit WM3700 controller is designed for large scale, high bandwidth enterprise deployments. It easily handles from 8,000 to 96,000 mobile devices and manages up to 1,024 access points.

Altitude 3500 series are dual-radio access points that support simultaneous operation of 802.11a and 802.11b/g wireless networks. Each radio is dual band which can be configured for 802.11a or 802.11 b/g operation. Altitude 3500 series access points, in conjunction with Summit WM3000 series WLAN controllers, enable enterprise-grade wireless service with enhanced mobility and security. This easy-to-deploy solution offers the flexibility to connect securely to remote corporate private networks, the Internet and local network resources with the speed and reliability to support the most demanding applications, including real-time video and voice. The all-in-one Altitude 3500 AP offers a new level of cost-efficiency and networking simplicity for employees in branch offices or telecommuters working at home.

Altitude 3510 AP is for indoor deployment. It comes with four (4) external omni-directional detachable antennas. It is suitable for wall, ceiling or out-of-sight plenum installation. Altitude 3550 is specifically designed for outdoor use, delivers enterprise-class wireless service in harsh environments. In addition to a NEMA 4X-weatherized housing, severe-weather features include integrated lightning arrestors, surge protectors, extreme temperature range operation and an array of antennas.

Altitude 4600 series Access Points (APs) offers high-performance wireless service using 802.11n technology. Customers will experience much more resilient wireless coverage along with higher bandwidth wireless access per user. Enterprises can deploy mission critical applications across wireless, enabling greater mobility and productivity of the workforce. Altitude 4600 series APs include concurrent dual radios. Altitude 4610 comes with internal integrated antennas. Altitude 4620 comes with detachable external antennas.

Extreme Networks Wireless Management Suite (WMS) is an intuitive, browser-based wireless network management solution for deployment, management, troubleshooting and monitoring of enterprise WLANs. Network administrators can manage hundreds of sites as well as thousands of devices, view the status and location of wireless infrastructure devices and clients, search for specific pieces of equipment, troubleshoot network issues, generate reports and export raw data. WMS simplifies the management of your wireless network with an intuitive web-based user interface. Network administrators with little or no RF experience can manage their wireless networks within a few hours of installing WMS.

Summary

Definition of a Mobile Strategy is a top Enterprise IT Issue

  • Although CIOs are trying to control mobile access, many existing and new applications are converting to wireless. These include email, CRM and sales productivity, GSM/WiFi, voice, video, RFID, monitoring, surveillance, location, and others
  • At the same time mobile devices are quickly evolving-cell phones, laptops, PDAs, VoWLAN phones, and dual mode phones. There is a growing expectation that the new devices will be able to transparently roam across networks.
  • New requirements are emerging to control and manage these applications

The Extreme Networks Advantage

  • Complete suite of wireless LAN products providing highly scalable, secure voice grade performance.
  • Flexible deployment models enable economical and easy-to-manage configurations, whether you need to deploy WLAN in a large facility, a medium sized building, or multiple branch offices across the world.
  • Ability to design, deploy and manage an integrated wired and wireless solution–using its complete line of award-winning switches-with comprehensive security, Quality of Service (QoS), and management. This offers simplicity throughout all phases of your wireless solution lifecycle, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership.

Features & Benefits

Features

  • Ease of deployment and management
  • Enterprise-class mobility for mission-critical applications. High availability solution with multi-controller clustering.
  • Comprehensive security with a rich set of authentication and access control options, wireless IDS/IPS

Solution Strengths

Architecture

To better support growing amounts of wireless users, emerging applications and convergence in the enterprise environment, Extreme Networks offers a secure and standards-based wireless LAN architecture that benefits from centralized management, the distributed processing of critical functions such as security and QoS.

Wired-Wireless Integration

Extreme Networks offers its customers the choice of an integrated WLAN solution or an overlay solution for maximum flexibility. In either case, you can configure security, QoS, and other parameters to optimally work together across the network. In addition, Extreme Networks provides a common view into the network with its EPICenter® management platform.

Security

Extreme Networks offers comprehensive, end-to-end security capabilities that provide worry-free wireless communications, operation, and management against network threats.

  • Wired network and corporate infrastructure capabilities throughout its wired edge and core switches
  • Wireless LAN with options for browser-based login, MAC address verification, or 802.1x Enterprise AAA identity management. Privacy options range from unencrypted communication, shared key, to WPA1, and WPA2
  • Stateful and Role-based firewall
  • IPSec VPN gateway for site-to-site and site-to-remote VPNs
  • Best-in-class wireless IDS/IPS solution including AirDefense WIPS integration and sensor mode for access points

Guest Access

A simple way to provide secure authenticated access on a WLAN for users and devices using a standard web browser. Guest user authentication allows enterprises to offer authenticated access to the network by capturing and re-directing a web browsers session to a captive portal login page where the user must enter valid credentials to be granted access to the network. The web based guest user administrator tool provides the ability to create guest user accounts on the local database on the Summit WM controller. The guest user provisioning tool is designed for non-administrative users such as front desk personnel

Performance and Scalability

Extreme Networks WLAN solutions offer large-scale, voice-grade performance. This is possible with a scalable architecture, high-Speed Cross-Subnet roaming, end-to-End QoS, and RF management.

Availability

All aspects of Extreme Networks WLAN solutions provide enterprise-grade high availability. This includes clustering of controllers to provide a redundancy group for 1:N redundancy. With SmartRF, self healing of radio network is accomplished if an access point fails.

VoIP Support

Summit WM3000 series controllers support Layer 2/Layer 3 inter-controller roaming. Inter-controller Layer 3 roaming allows clients to roam between controllers which are not on the same LAN or IP subnet. Summit WM controllers’ architecture offers end-to-end QoS from the wireless client to the packet destination. In addition, QoS is easy to configure for different classes of users through the virtual APs or SSIDs. The wireless QoS solution maintains the correct traffic priority from client to destination.

Design and Deployment

Extreme Networks offers both product and service capabilities that facilitate the design and deployment of WLAN systems. From a product perspective, WLAN solutions from Extreme Networks can be deployed anywhere within an IP network, regardless of existing topology.

For pre-installation site surveys, Extreme Networks offers Summit WMScanner application bundled with the Extreme Networks Wireless Management Suite (WMS). Summit WMScanner allows WMS to define new coverage areas, generate updated floor plans and display device locations. Summit WMScanner enables layout and measurement of wireless LANs. It allows CAD drawings (and other formats) to be imported into the application. Optionally, customers can create designs separately using a RF simulation tool like Motorola's LANPlanner. The LANPlanner design can be exported into WMS and then validated under actual deployment situation with Summit WMScanner.

Monitoring and Management

WMS provides several levels of dashboard view on the health of the network. Network administrators can select a Global (multi-site) level, site level and device level dashboards. In addition one can select a dashboard view of a particular SSID. Dashboard views provide a quick graphical view on the status of the network health and make timely decisions to ensure continued wireless service. Alarms and events are graphically displayed by both severity and category. Severity and category information can be optionally displayed in pie chart, column chart and grid formats. Optionally, move your cursor over the graphic to display alarms and events based on percentage of total (pie chart) or number out of total (column chart). This is a significant enhancement over previous releases, as administrators can now visually assess the severity of alarms and events in respect to the total number of other existing events of both greater or lesser severity.