In the environment that I am in we are quite loyal to Cisco. End to End Wireless Infrastructure is overlaid on a 5508 WLC. Air-1252 and 1262’s litter than campus and in the high density areas Xirrus Arrays handle 300-500 clients in concentrated spaces. For the most part it is flawless. VLAN’s segregate areas or groups defined on logical containers such as, Year level, Faculty or any tag we want to assign.
With the advent of iPads and the need to print/stream/make them even better in the enterprise, Apple leverage the Bonjour protocol for a lot of features. This is great. Simple connectivity and discovery and I am sure at home it works easily enough. Enter the Campus and the TTL value of 1 for Bonjour. With the TTL set as 1 the moment the bonjour packet hits a gateway it’s all over.
Aerohive address this issue with their Bonjour Gateway. To find out more read the whitepaper linked below or the marketing guff in the second link. It was almost like Aerohive read my mind! Good timing! One of the best parts of this solution is that you don’t need to have a Aerohive only network. It is multi-vendor compatible! For a small purchase headaches can be solved! This makes it appealing to other wireless environments such as Cisco, HP, Xirrus, Meru, Meraki.
Aerohive Bonjour Gateway White paper
My thoughts
Well I give them points for giving the issue some attention. I know in an EDU environment that a lot of BYOD consist of iPads. It will be good to see the first deployments and hopefully I can get my hands on one from my suppliers and do a write-up.
This has also been a thorn in my side. We’ll see if this is a niche, or if other vendors start offering this.
Yeah. At this stage, in an education environment people just want it to work. They don’t care about protocol limitations or vlan’s or networking Architectures. Looking forward to reporting back my findings!
Burkey,
I know Peter Davison (Head Honcho for AeroHive in Australia).. If you are after a hookup, please let me know and I will do an online introduction (via email). Another wireless vendor I suggest looking at, that I am currently investigating for my EDU environment is Aruba.. Could be worth checking them out too. I think in the near future, its not going to be about 1:1 but 1:Many .. Catering for that is important 🙂
Great post mate, I will be keeping my eye out for more- Aaron (oxy)
Cheers mate – appreciate the shout out. I have kept my eye on this for a while. At this stage high density cannot be beaten by Xirrus but other vedors like Aruba, Meru and Meraki are earning their stripes. It seems Dpez is also a wireless boffin lately with his start on CWNE certifications.
Ta mate.