Aruba unveils low-priced WLAN gear

Network World - Aruba Networks today showed off a new family of low-priced wireless LAN access points and controllers designed for fast setup and easy management at branch offices, teleworkers' home offices and small businesses.

Customers plug in the new remote access points, connect them to a gateway or other WAN link, and the devices automatically connect to a central Aruba controller and download the necessary WLAN security, usage and management configurations for the local site and its user, the company says. The access points and local controllers can be administered remotely. No VPN software needs to be loaded on to local clients.

To do this, Aruba used consumer products available from a contract manufacturer, but with new software, including an integrated firewall, to download and enforce enterprise-grade security and management policies. This strategy means Aruba could price the new gear aggressively: one access point model for one to five users is $99, another model that supports as many as 50 users and includes 802.11n, is $395. The new controller, for as many as 256 users, is $1,495.

"No one has an enterprise-class access point at $99 list," says Paul DeBeasi, senior analyst, wireless and mobility, for Burton Group. "If you're looking at deploying three or four thousand branch offices, $400 per access versus $99 is a huge difference. They never hit that kind of pricing point before."

Aruba previously offered a small remote access point. The device had to be preconfigured by the IT department, then shipped to the local office. The access point created a secure tunnel over the available WAN link to a central Aruba controller, becoming in effect an access point on the central campus.

But the access point could only support about four locally connected devices, and if the WAN is cut off, the access point shuts down, according to Michael Tennefoss, Aruba's head of strategic marketing. If several of these were deployed, the branches had to add a router for local traffic or rely on the WAN link to funnel all traffic first to the remote central controller, which sent it back to the other local access points.

Customers wanted simpler setup and management, and a lower price to make big deployments cost-effective, all without sacrificing enterprise-level security and management features, Tennefoss says.

Nearly all WLAN vendors have products aimed at the small-midsize business, home office and branch office markets. Most have required the use of a local WLAN controller, a costly addition especially for large-scale deployments. But some vendors also have offered access point-only solutions. Cisco offers the widely used Integrated Services Router for this market, with WLAN controller modules, and the Hybrid Remote Edge Access Point Motorola's Adaptive Access Point is designed to attack some of the same issues as Aruba's offering.