Monday, 30 August 2004 15:01 EST

The Industry's Highest Capacity WLAN Switch, New RF Management Capabilities and Low-cost Grid Point Technology Combine to Deliver 4th Generation Enterprise WLANs

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA - August 30, 2004 - Aruba Wireless Networks™ (Aruba) today introduced new products that enable enterprises to deploy wireless grids, the industry's first structured architecture for deploying high-performance enterprise wireless networks while lowering the costs of deployment by over 80 percent. Aruba's Wireless Grid architecture integrates wireless LANs (WLANs) with structured building distribution systems and builds on Aruba's pioneering centralized approach to securing and managing enterprise wireless networks.

Aruba's wireless grid is made possible by new higher performance, lower cost WLAN products. These include the Aruba 5100, a double capacity version of its signature 5000 series of modular WLAN switches, pervasive RF management capabilities that are centrally controlled from WLAN switches and a new line of low-cost grid points (GPs)-the Aruba AP 60 series. With these new products, enterprises can reduce by over 80 percent the operational costs associated with traditional in-ceiling WLAN deployments.

These new products and capabilities will seamlessly integrate with all existing Aruba products to deliver unprecedented investment protection. In addition, wireless grids may be deployed alongside existing Aruba or 3rd party solutions to secure and lock the air with advanced security policies that prevent airborne security threats - completely protecting the wired network from wireless intrusions.

"Aruba is once again pioneering the next stage of enterprise wireless that lets corporations truly make wireless pervasive and high-performance," said Keerti Melkote, co-founder and VP of product management and marketing for Aruba Wireless Networks. "Having successfully addressed the issues of security, mobility and manageability for enterprise wireless LANs with centralized wireless switching, Aruba is now delivering on the 4th generation vision of a pervasive, high-performance mobile networking utility in the most cost-effective way with its new wireless grid products."

The Aruba 5100 WLAN Switch Makes Wireless Grids Fast, Reliable and Secure

Aruba's new 5100 WLAN switch enables dense deployments for performance, while giving IT staff centralized control and industrial-strength wireless security at many different levels. The Aruba 5100 takes the industry's only modular enterprise-class WLAN switch - the Aruba 5000 - to the next level in capacity and fault-tolerance by delivering twice the capacity along with active-active redundancy in a single-chassis-based system.

The Aruba 5100 comes factory equipped with a single supervisor card capable of processing over 1.8 gigabits of 802.11i/AES encrypted traffic, a line card and redundant power supplies. The Aruba 5100 can be optionally configured with two supervisor cards and line cards that can operate concurrently within a single Aruba 5100. This fully redundant solution simultaneously doubles the encrypted throughput of a single Aruba 5100 to 3.6 gigabits per second and enables active-active redundancy to create a highly reliable centralized WLAN system. Existing Aruba 5000 systems can be easily upgraded to the high-capacity, fault-tolerant Aruba 5100 with a simple software upgrade and the addition of a redundant supervisor card.

Aruba's wireless grid extends over-the-air 802.11 encryption techniques such as WPA2/AES and WPA/TKIP over-the-wire for the industry's first 802.11 based endpoint-to-datacenter encryption solution. This approach eliminates the risk of potential misuse of GPs deployed in user work-space by applying the strong security framework delivered by the new 802.11i standard.

Quality of service (QoS) is maintained in a wireless grid infrastructure without compromising security through high-performance micro-cells and extensive support for QoS standards such as 802.11e, Diffserv and 802.1p. In addition, centralized stateful application classification ensures that delay and jitter-sensitive applications such as voice receive the appropriate QoS treatment in a wireless grid.

Pervasive Grid RF Management Makes Wireless Easy to Provision & Manage

Aruba's wireless grid delivers the industry's most advanced RF management features through sophisticated RF management software that runs throughout the grid. The new software adds unique adaptive capacity management and on-demand delivery of RF services. This includes new interference avoidance algorithms that prevent wireless gridlock in dense deployments as well as multi-point location triangulation that enables the real-time location tracking of wireless users and devices down to under three feet. This is made possible by having multiple GPs participate in the location tracking process - giving IT staff the ability to accurately pinpoint the exact location of users and devices. (See related release "Aruba Wireless Networks Introduces the Wireless Grid, The Next Step In Enterprise Wireless Architecture", for more details on these capabilities).

Wireless grids also include all the self-healing and load balancing capabilities that are currently supported by Aruba's AirOS software for ceiling-deployed thin APs.

New Aruba 60 Series Grid Points Make Wireless Grids Come to Life

The Aruba 60 series GPs are low-cost, software-programmable 802.11a/b/g APs that make dense wireless grids possible - eliminating the high costs associated with deploying and managing traditional APs in the ceiling.

Aruba 60 series GPs can be deployed over open ports on existing network jacks and are specially designed to blend into the structured cabling and other building infrastructure. They can be physically secured with special purpose mounting kits and locked down even if they are in user accessible locations. Unlike conventional APs, no logical security risks exist for the Aruba 60 series since they do not store any encryption keys or configuration data. This makes them an ideal choice for out-of-ceiling deployments.

Like all Aruba APs, the Aruba 60 series GPs are simple and easy to deploy, with automatic configuration capabilities. In addition, the Aruba 60 series GPs are deployed in easily accessible locations and purpose-built to be repaired and replaced by IT personnel. Using grid coordinates, IT can quickly identify the exact location of a faulty GP on a floor plan and track down and service these GPs-without having to deploy expensive resources to hunt for them behind ceiling tiles.

The Aruba 60 series also supports RF monitoring on all radio bands concurrently, while providing user access. The Aruba 60 model GP supports dual-band detachable antennas so any type of antenna or coverage pattern can be provided. The Aruba 61 model GP supports integrated, omni-directional high-gain diversity antennas.

Innovative New Pricing Model Makes Dense Deployments Possible

To spur the deployment of wireless grids, Aruba is introducing the addition of a new pricing model specially developed for wireless grid deployments. This new utility pricing model lets enterprises pay as they grow by purchasing wireless grid software per GP on an annualized basis.

Introductory utility pricing for the software is set at an annual fee of $200 USD per GP per annum. It includes the new grid RF management software, secure wireless access software and wireless intrusion prevention (WIP) capabilities, along with annual software maintenance for these features. The Aruba 61 GP and an extended 1-year hardware warranty that includes replacements for faulty Aruba 61 GPs are included for free with the wireless grid software.

Customers can continue to purchase the wireless grid under the traditional pricing model where wireless grid software and annual software maintenance are unbundled and sold separately from the Grid Points.

About Aruba Wireless Networks, Inc.

Aruba Wireless Networks develops and markets centralized systems that enable corporations to secure their networks from the dual threats of Wi-Fi and mobility. Aruba's solution consists of a full range of programmable security platforms designed to securely connect mobile users and mobile devices to corporate applications. Aruba is privately-held and has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific and India and employs staff around the world. Aruba has received over $59 million in three rounds of venture funding from top-tier venture firms - Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and WK Technology Fund. Visit Aruba Wireless Networks at http://www.arubanetworks.com