Explore enterprise-level Wireless Network Solutions

As the development of wireless networks, enterprise-level applications have undoubtedly played a huge role in promoting the development of wireless networks. In the face of more and more enterprises, the use of wireless networks has evolved from simple construction to increasingly cumbersome. The diversity of wireless environments has brought about an increasing number of problems. Building a brand new enterprise-level wireless network solution is the focus of our new round of discussion.

Without a doubt, the Internet is changing human society, and countless applications based on new models have created unprecedented prosperity in the information age. The more people do not need the network, the more difficult the traditional wired connection method is to meet their needs. Naturally, wireless Ethernet, which is free and convenient from the limitations of cables, is favored by more and more users and gradually becomes an indispensable supplement to wired networks. Even in some special application environments, users have begun to use wireless networks to carry production and business environments and run key services or value-added services. The selection of wireless network solutions has become a concern of many CIOs.

When talking about wireless, it seems that performance is required. However, in rational evaluation criteria, performance is by no means the only important item to evaluate. The architecture concept is the most noteworthy evaluation content, it directly determines the scalability, security, and functional complexity of a set of wireless network solutions. In addition, unlike highly integrated consumer or SOHO products, wireless solutions for large and medium-sized enterprises or campus users must face more deployment difficulties and complex application requirements.

If an independent AP is simply spliced with a wired network, the effect of 1 + 1 = 2 is definitely not achieved. In most cases, you may find that the bandwidth is not increased, roaming is not supported, and there is interference between APs ), it also brings about 1 + 1> 2 management costs. Some requirements cannot be achieved by splicing methods, such as QoS, multi-channel, multi-SSID, and unified deployment of corresponding security policies. Obviously, good centralized management capabilities are essential features of enterprise-level wireless network solutions, and their implementation level is also determined by the Architecture concept.

Since full discretization is an unacceptable model for enterprise-level wireless solutions, can comprehensive centralization meet requirements? There are indeed some "wireless switch + thin AP" Solutions in the market. These solutions use the radical idea of centralized management and centralized business processing to position the thin AP as a pure distributed antenna, the wireless switch is responsible for all the rest, logically like a very large traditional AP.

This does solve the problems existing in the traditional solution in roaming switching (latency jitter) and performance (throughput), but it also has inherent defects. Because all data is forwarded in a centralized manner through a wireless switch, the number of APS is limited first. If more wireless switches are deployed, the Network Complexity becomes difficult to control.

In addition, wireless switches in the logic center become a black hole in reliability, and users have to double their investment to avoid spof. In addition, with the popularization of the 802.11n specification, the bottleneck between the link bandwidth and the wireless switch processing capability becomes more prominent, reducing the cost and effectiveness of the solution.

To address the above problems, HP Procurve proposed a new generation of adaptive wireless network solutions. This solution adopts centralized management, but does not require centralized business processing. By enhancing the AP's processing capabilities, data encryption and decryption, QoS, identity authentication, and other features can be implemented on the edge of the wireless network. Only data streams that require further processing can reach the wireless controller, eliminates the dependency on central resources.

That is to say, in most cases, the wireless controller and the AP can only have data streams for management control. The AP implements distributed forwarding and the business data goes through a direct connection path, realize direct access from source to destination. In this way, the solution inherits the operational advantages of centralized management and control, and has higher processing efficiency and performance, and has good support for latency-sensitive applications. Distributed processing improves the reliability of the solution from another perspective. At least when the wireless controller fails, the AP can continue to work and forward data independently.

To verify the actual results of the HP Procurve enterprise wireless network solution, we have established a complete environment in the lab with the support of HP. Engineers will perform comprehensive tests as soon as possible to provide readers and friends with brilliant serialization reports.