The Not Fun “Juniper Has Been Acquired By HPE” Blog

Before we talk about Juniper (and Mist, specifically), let me take you way back in time to another acquisition.

I wrote that article back in 2012 after several great years of enjoying Meraki as a pioneering cloud-managed network vendor at the same time I was dealing with endless bugs in Cisco’s wireless controllers and APs. The cultures of the two companies seemed so different- Cisco tends to be cavalier (in my opinion) about bugs especially in their WLAN related code sets, and customers are very much an extension of the QA process whether they want to be or not. Code roulette is a fact of life, and disruptive frequent remedial code upgrades and engineering builds were a fact of life back then. By contrast, Meraki generally worked well, and when trouble rarely hit, support was extremely responsive.

Since the acquisition, Cisco gave Meraki an extremely long leash to seemingly operate mostly independently (at least from the customer perspective). They are only just now getting around to consolidating business units, switches and access points and pushing even legacy management towards the cloud dashboard. It needs to be noted that the Cisco Catalyst/Aironet and Meraki lines and customer bases were far enough apart in function and philosophy that there was room for both to remain generally unsullied by each other for more than a decade.

Now on to HPE purchasing Juniper.

Unlike the Cisco/Meraki experiment that let customers on both sides breathe easy for so many years, it’s not gonna be that warm and fuzzy with this one. For me, HPE and Juniper more specifically equals Aruba and Mist- and that facet of this acquisition makes me uncomfortable. I have no idea how it’s going to turn out where the rubber meets the road- but I do know that as a Mist customer I did not choose Aruba as a vendor (nor did Aruba customers choose Mist and I respect that). Everyday, customers are choosing Aruba versus Mist and visa versa for their own reasons and requirements.

It’s highly likely that either Mist or Aruba will dominate at the end of the sausage making and there will be pain for many of us on the leftover pile. For anyone to have a vendor you didn’t choose forced down your throat is not a tasty thought regardless of which side of this you are on as a current customer. We all have no choice but to wait this out, but from the customer side let me share some of what sucks in the meantime.

We the customers were never asked.

I’m getting a bit fried on seeing one talking head after another pontificating about how this acquisition somehow creates “greater choice” for customers. That implies we want “greater choice” which will actually be LESS choice in the end. Just shut up already on that- we’re not that stupid out here in networking wilds. We selected what we selected after RFPs and product trials and “greater choice” in the future is just empty BS in this discussion. A clever marketing phrase brings no comfort while we all wait to see how badly our cheese will both be genetically altered AND moved once it all plays out. Don’t believe me, Mist and Aruba execs? Survey your customers. Other than internal evangelists (and zealots) who are thumping their chests about which company is better and will “win” in the end, there aren’t a lot of people that I’ve spoken to that are particularly energized about this whole thing.

Vendor messaging only adds to the tension.

In typical vapid marketing bullshitspeak, HPE promises “accelerated value” from the acquisition. Juniper makes it sound like their AI was the sexy milkshake that brought HPE to the Juniper yard. Some headlines out there seem to push the point.

But then there’s that Aruba evangelist who frequently posts on X taking potshots at everyone else’s AI while touting Aruba’s own, and has only stepped up his salvos since the purchase was announced.

The “mic drop” is from Neri implying that Aruba Central will subsume Mist’s AI and that somehow Aruba Central’s customer numbers prove it’s the right thing to do (?) Yet in other announcements the Mist exec team will supposedly lead the integrated business unit when all the dust settles- so Juniper’s AI must be better (?) AI, AI. AI… blah blah friggin blah. So did HPE buy Juniper because it has better AI despite the passions of their own insiders? On that topic, I need to say something…

Newsflash: AI is a building block and not THE PRODUCT in network access systems. I’m here to tell you that a vendor’s glossy can spin AI to be the grand solve-all, yet their code can be endlessly problematic, and their reporting and support UIs- you know, the daily important stuff to keeping networks running- can still suck ass. I’m talking about no specific vendor here and multiple vendors at the same time. Babies are being thrown out with the bathwater and customers are suffering from AI overhype while the important but unsexy basics of usability and stability aren’t being prioritized in spots.

Speaking of posts on X- Sam the Man Clements hit this whole mess right on the head here:

Nothing is gonna change- we promise! But it’s not a promise you can can count on…

Then there’s the general industry covering media…

And the pundits…

The rest of the year is gonna suck.

It wouldn’t break my heart if this acquisition is blocked, but I doubt it will be. Which means customers on both sides of the deal get to just wait and see what is to come of it all. Small environments that don’t like the results can fairly easily jump ship and go to Cisco, Extreme, Fortinet, or whoever else is out there as alternatives. Large customers (outside of the government who gets to spend everyone else’s money) don’t have the luxury of simply scrapping thousands of access points (modern APs list for over $2K apiece these days, but that insanity is fodder for another blog) and the rest of their access environments, and so many will absolutely have to take whatever’s coming whether they like it or not. That in itself creates enough anxiety- but piled on top we now get to spend the rest of 2024 hearing meaningless promises of accelerated value and tit-for tat proclamations of which vendor is “better”, along with the business-side analysis that spins the pending deal as wonderful or terrible depending on who is pushing the message.

Fun times.

Not.

Oscium’s Wi-Fi 6E Spectrum Analyzer

With Wi-Fi 6E networks being implemented, 6E access points shipping, and new 6E client devices introduced to market, those of us in the WLAN support game need to make sure we have tools to function in the new and expansive 6 GHz spectrum. Fundamental to wireless support is the ability to display the RF environment through the use of a spectrum analyzer. Oscium has a fairly deep history in the Wi-Fi spectrum analysis realm, and has introduced their Clarity model for the 6 GHz part of the 802.11ax world- in addition to working in 2.4 and 5 as well with a band span of 2.2 GHz to 7.25 GHz.

Physically, Oscium’s Clarity is just gorgeous. It has a solid well-engineered feel to it and is very nice to look at (as silly as that might sound.)

Oscium’s Clarity

Unlike past Oscium spectrum analyzers, you’ll need either a Windows PC or a Mac for Clarity- no mobile devices are supported yet. Also unlike Oscium’s other spectrum analyzers, Clarity cannot natively show 802.11-related information on detected SSIDs in the environment as it does not have that capability under the hood from the chip perspective. It is strictly RF views, unless coupled with a tool like Intuitibits’ Wi-Fi Explorer Pro 3 when run on a 6E Macbook. At the time of this writing, no such Macbook exists so even Wi-Fi Explorer Pro 3 can only show 6E spectrum and not SSIDs when Clarity is used as an external adapter. Hats off to Intuitibits for building in support despite suitable hardware not yet being available.

Here’s Clarity looking at my Meraki 6E environment at Wirednot HQ:

And… what it looks like in the Wi-Fi Explorer environment, so far.

Read more about Oscium’s Clarity at the company’s product page.

Arista Numbed My Brain at Mobility Field Day 8 (and not in a good way)

I hesitated a bit about writing this blog, in the spirit of “if you can’t say something nice…”. And we all know that when someone says “no offense, but…” the rest of the statement is likely going to offend. But I’ll take my chances here, and start off by saying I really DON’T want to offend, and the following opinion is just that- my opinion. As for the individual gents from Arista who presented at Mobility Field Day 8, you won’t find nicer folks. Jatin Parekh, Kumar Narayanan, Nadeem Akhtar, Pramod Badjate, and Sriram Venkiteswaran are obviously extremely intelligent and also passionate in their presentations. They collectively bring great credit to the House of Arista.

Now on to my frustration (did I mention that I am well aware that this is just MY OWN opinion?). Funny things happen to the time-space continuum when you are involved with a technical presentation. As a presenter, there often isn’t enough time to say and show everything you’d like to. As a consumer of the content on the other side of the table, time sometimes flies by because you are so engrossed in what’s being presented, and hours feel like minutes that you don’t want to end. Other times minutes feel like someone stretched each one by a factor of 10X as you try to not drift off to your happy place to escape the presentation that can’t end soon enough. Unfortunately, I was really struggling to stay locked on to Arista on this go round.

What happened for me here?

I’m fortunate in that I’m a many-time Field Day delegate who gets to occasionally hang out with the very women and men who define and shape the networking industry. That is truly a gift. The other side of that privilege is that sometimes a given vendor’s latest presentation can sound and feel a lot like the last one, if you have done a number of Field Days. That is not the vendor’s fault, but it is where I found myself on this outing.

Even though many of the words and topics were different than my last go round hearing Arista present at a wireless or mobility Field Day event, the vibe was the same. To me, it felt a mile wide and an inch deep for the most part. There was waaaaaaaay too much about Cognitive Everything and just not enough on the topic of wireless. I’m probably guilty of assuming I’d hear mostly about wireless-specific topics, but by the time we finally got there I was fairly done in. I found myself thinking the following random thoughts:

• Arista bought Mojo, and Mojo was AirTight before that
• I have yet to meet anyone who ran AirTight or Mojo wireless, and still have yet to meet an actual Arista wireless user (Arista data center networking is a whole different story)
• Often, Arista refers to a giant wireless environment in India as did Mojo, but that’s hard to get energized about given the previous bullet
• Arista isn’t the only Mobility Field Day vendor to do the “Let’s introduce the whole freakin portfolio and all of our marketspeak, and if you’re still awake at the end we’ll touch on a little bit of wireless” approach, but I was primed for differentiators. Like what is truly compelling about the mobility side of the Arista house these days?
• Can I use Arista wireless if I don’t have Arista switches and don’t want to do VXLAN? If so, how?
• Too much dashboard talk is smothering, I tellya
• Come on…. where’s the radio stuff? Where’s 6E?
• Where are your real-life WLAN-specific success stories?

You get the point- I personally didn’t get much out of it. As people we’re all wired differently, and I’m guessing some of my fellow delegates maybe have a different take on the MFD8 Arista presentations. But for me, I just could not get into it. Yet I know that Arista HAS to be doing cool wireless stuff where the rubber meets the road- where real wireless devices connect to the network and no one gives two figs about Cognitive Whatever.

I very much want to see Arista back at future Field Days whether I’m a delegate or watching at home, but I’d also like to see them shake up their formula a bit. Put more Mobility in your Mobility Field Day presentations, says I.

Reading this, I feel a bit like a jerk having written it. So be it- I mean it constructively and I stand behind it.

The Thing About Ventev

Having just participated in Mobility Field Day 8, I got to spend some quality time with Ventev– during which I had an epiphany of sorts. We’ll get to that in a moment.

I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in many of the Field Day events through the years. They know me out there in Silly Valley where vendors and Field Day delegates come together and discuss industry trends, new products, what works and what sucks, and so on.

Being a veteran Field Day-er, I understand the routine. Vendors present what they want the world to know, delegates ask questions and make comments to dig deeper or provide criticism (some constructive, some because often the vendors can be decoupled from the reality of what end users actually need). How effective a Field Day is depends on (in my opinion) how effective the vendors are at following the guidance given to them for their presentations by Field Day management, and the quality of the delegate’s questions and comments. There are human beings involved on both sides of the table, and sometimes one side or the other just makes a given presentation laborious. Maybe boring content is offered a mile wide and an inch deep, or perhaps a given delegate just cannot shut up as they enjoy the sound of their own voice as they redesign the vendor’s product for them in real time. Again, the human factor.

One prevailing theme from the vendor side is this: WE THINK THIS FEATURE OR THINGY IS TRULY INNOVATIVE AND SO WE WILL NOW TRY TO CONVINCE YOU DELEGATES AND THE FOLKS AT HOME SO YOU WILL PAY US LOTS OF MONEY FOR THE HARDWARE AND A SHITLOAD OF LICENSES BUT YOU MAY NOT IMMEDIATELY SEE THE VALUE SO WE GOTTA WALK YOU THROUGH IT WHILE WE HOPE YOU DON’T ASK TOO MANY QUESTIONS THAT COULD CUT INTO OUR STORY AND HENCE OUR BOTTOM LINE.

Nothing new here.

Let’s get back to Ventev, shall we? I promised you an epiphany.

So I’m listening to their Mobility Field Day 8 presentations about specialty enclosures, solar powered network “stations” (my word, not theirs) and antennas when a tidal wave of realization came over me. While network equipment vendors work hard to convince you that their often murky magic is worth the constantly elevating costs for what I often feel ought to be largely commoditized by now, Ventev sells fact. Ventev sells tangible reality. Ventev sells physics.

Whether it’s their Venvolt battery packs for survey work and temporary power needs or providing solutions for wireless access points to function out in the middle of Frozen Friggin Nowhere, Ventev doesn’t need to convince anyone of anything. When they talk about specialty antennas, their situational benefits are obvious and the physics of it all is instantaneously provable.

The Ventev narrative isn’t one of trying to out-AI or out-dashboard the other guy. They just make wireless environments better (or in some cases, even POSSIBLE). The Ventev story is end-to-end real, with no hype to sort through. No hyper-granular, squeeze-you-until-it-hurts-then-do-it-again-in-three-years-because-we-got-your-wallet–by-the-nuts-now licensing bullshit to hold your nose and pay for.

That is pretty sweet. And all too rare these days.

I suggest you get to know Ventev. Their presentations from Mobility Field Day 8 and earlier events are all found here.

Are Wi-Fi Networks in General THAT Bad?

Let me start by apologizing for a long absence here. It would seem it was my turn for life for a while. People and animals I love got sick and passed on, and those inevitable changes to each of our existences came knocking on my own door. I also had some demons that poke me at night sometimes to exercise.

But a couple of recent vendor and VAR interactions brought me back here.

Really? You Don’t NEED us?
I’ve been operating in the collective big overall networking universe for at least a quarter of a century now, so I get the rhythm of the music. Everyone has a part, and I begrudge few individuals for playing theirs (except maybe the vendor exec that has the gall to try to explain how sucking my bank account dry with complicated licensing schemes suddenly equals value or perhaps innovation). Still I’m occasionally surprised when I’m presented with some new solution, dashboard, or service that I was doing fine without yesterday and today, but if I don’t get on board my tomorrow will certainly be disappointing for my end users.

THEM: We have it to offer, so you MUST need it. It solves all kinds of problems.
ME: I’m not sure what we’re doing differently, but we don’t seem to have the problems you mention.
THEM: Bah. Everyone has those problems. Lots of them. In mass quantities. The freakin’ sky is falling!
ME: I’m gonna get some coffee now. Good talk, thanks.
THEM: You are pretty lucky then. Everyone else has problems that they need our stuff to find.

I’m guessing I’m not the only one who has been part of that kind of conversation.

Let’s unpack that a bit.
I always find the messaging that “lots of networks are just fraught with endless problems that you need help with” to be a little confounding. Why? I ask myself that, and I think I can answer it- beyond the “I’ve been doing this a while and have arguably seen it all” effect. I offer these:

– We are on what generation of Wi-Fi now? Sixth? Sixth extra special? Shouldn’t the general kinks be worked out by now? With the Wi-Fi Alliance chest-thumping about all their certification programs and the IEEE putting out wireless “standards”, everything should generally just click, no?

No. I’m being sarcastic of course. This many DECADES after the original 802.11 miracle, we’re still dealing with driver issues. And that fuzzy, ill-defined gap between enterprise and consumer end devices, and the denial by groups like the Wi-Fi Alliance that this is a serious problem. After all, there is middleware kinda solutions that make it all right, no? Again, no. Not without paying through the nose in upfront and ongoing costs. Pffft.

So what is the expensive new dashboard, or managed services, exactly delivering? Is it telling me I got driver issues on a given client? Newsflash- I can tell that without the dashboard when a client stops working right after an OS update.

–Shouldn’t proper WLAN design mitigate a lot of what the magic dashboard is supposedly figuring out? Price out Ekahau or iBwave (both fantastic tools) and the training and ongoing licensing for both. They are not inexpensive. Yet, somehow, you can design your networks perfectly using high end tools, and STILL need “help” with all the inevitable Wi-Fi issues you are going to have. Smells funny…

–Speaking of expensive… Have you looked at the pricing on the latest access points? We have reached INSANITY in this area, when indoor Wi-Fi access points list prices EACH top $3K. For an access point. Without the mandatory licensing that The Industry now gets fat on. And for that lofty expenditure, you still need all the professional services and pricey dashboards because that increased pricing solves… nothing? Same problems are still with us, evidently.

You suck, Lee. You’re a real freakin’ downer, man. Perhaps. A lot of gloomy shit has been happening for me lately, but that aside- something is wrong here. Either I’m doing networking wrong, because I don’t have all the problems that I’m supposed to, OR those problems are the bogey man maybe created by The Industry to have more to sell us. We just can’t collectively be this far down the Wi-Fi timeline and be that bad off, can we? If we are, then everyone from the IEEE to the Alliance to vendors have screwed up. And if we AREN’T that bad off, then we’re being bilked for solutions that we really shouldn’t need.

Is there a point here? Whether I’m articulating it clearly or not, something isn’t quite right in Denmark, or in Silly Valley. Or is it just me?

I Friggin LOVE You, NetAlly LANBERT

His name was LANBERT and he came from the west
To show which cables sucks and which are best
With a push of a button it’s doing it’s stuff
Hopefully for mGig the existing wire is enough…
Oh looky there, this one passes just fine
That LANBERT just saved us money and time

–Ode to LANBERT, by Wendall Pissmont Jr

There’s a new Bert in town… forget about Reynolds*, Bacharach*, and that whiny neurotic muppet from Sesame Street. Them cats is yesterday. NetAlly has recently introduced LANBERT (at Mobility Field Day 6), and if you are in the business of network wiring then you should pay attention.

This was easily one of the more thought provoking sessions of MFD6, says I. Let’s set the stage: you have an installed cable base, and are migrating access points to Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, and at long last we hopefully will see the massive throughputs that WLAN industry marketers have been telling us we should expect for years… like to the point where the old reliable 1 Gig uplink may not cut it. Do you need to replace that cable to get mGig performance?

LANBERT to the rescue! There should be no mystery when it comes to cabling performance capabilities. Many of us grew up knowing the value of cable certification testing, and now the free LANBERT app adds a much needed evolution to the notion.

Working with NetAlly’s Etherscope nXG and and LinkRunner 10G portable analyzers, LANBERT “generates and measures the transmission of line rate Ethernet frames over your network cabling infrastructure, qualifying its ability to support 1G/10G on fiber and 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G on copper links.” You are proving what an installed UTP or fiber run can really do despite what a certification report might say, without needing a standalone certification tester.

Test that existing cable for mGig before the new AP goes in, and don’t assume that “old” runs can’t support the new speeds.

I’ve long beaten the drum that the physical layer is critical to good networking. I’ve always viewed each part of a structured wiring system as it’s own component, worthy of note when it comes time for labeling, troubleshooting, and yes- performance testing. I’ve seen old cable work surprisingly well, and new cable disappoint for a number of reasons. There is simply no reason to guess how UTP and fiber will perform FOR REAL, with LANBERT. It’s the shizzle, baby!

View this fascinating Field Day presentation here.

*Yes, I know these dudes are actually named Burt and not Bert. Shut up.

VenVolt 2- Power to the (Survey) People

Hello wireless friends,

My name is VenVolt 2. I’m soon to be sent by the excellent folks at Ventev to assist you with your wireless site surveys in those situations where you need to power an access point. If you caught Mobility Field Day 6, then you saw Ventev Product Line Manager Chris Jufer introduce me… it’s a little daunting being shown off, but I can handle it. I was born for this role- some of you probably know my dad, VenVolt 1:

VenVolt 1

The Old Man still has his own magic, and quite the following. But we all know the drill… everything changes. If you get lucky, the change is for the better- and that’s where I come in. Here’s my profile pic, in case you missed it:

VenVolt 2

I’m sleek, I’m sexy, and I got the juice. Ventev learned a lot from my pappy, and I’m proud to be his follow-on in the product line. V1 uses Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, but I’m LiPo, baby! V1 was also a bit of a porker at 4 1/2 pounds, but I go a svelt 2.2 pounds for you less macho types. And I’m rated at 26,400 mAh- just at the edge of legal airline carry-on. I charge in about 3 hours, and will power an AP for around 6-8 hours, depending on model. I could go on, but I’m already bragging a bit so maybe I’ll just show you some specs.

But first I gotta tell you- they are shipping me with this very cool bag!

You can already see the benefit there, I’m guessing. It’s not just a protective case for my handsome finish, it’s also an accessory at survey time when you need to attach me to something. (Think safety, says I.)

Now back to some specs and application notes from my demo reel. I think you’re gonna like what you see… Look for me around late September or early October of this year. Meanwhile, feast your eyes on this goodness:

VenVolt 2 by Ventev, ports, etc

I trust that you dig it? Of course you do. Because you’re smart and good-looking, too. Or maybe just smart, as I take a second look. But what matters is that I’m (almost) here for you, and you’re gonna want to make sure we get together for your Q4 surveys. I’ll see you then.

Hugs,

Ventev’s VenVolt 2

Mist Systems Has an Advantage- but Also Gets a Yellow Card

Now the race is on
And here comes pride up the backstretch
Heartaches are goin’ to the inside
My tears are holdin’ back
They’re tryin’ not to fall
My heart’s out of the runnin’
True love’s scratched for another’s sake
The race is on and it looks like heartache
And the winner loses all
-Sang by George Jones

Though events like Mobility Field Day 6 may not be typically thought of as being contests, I can only imagine that those participating from the vendor side feel the competitive heat. The spotlight is on, the dollars to participate have been spent, the camera is rolling, and there is a tight window to differentiate your offerings and approach from the rest of the pack- all while a group of delegates interrupts your presentation and peppers you with questions. Success is measured by Twitter conversations, blog posts, and ultimately sales numbers. As a long-time Field Day participant from the delegate side of the paradigm, I can’t help but think that Mist still has an advantage of sorts when they present. I’ll explain that here, but will also point out that cockiness can sometimes cost you based on one comment made by Mist during MFD6.

The Mist Advantage

Mist was a late-comer to the mature WLAN industry, being founded in 2014. But those involved with starting the company are hardly newcomers to the game, and they have done a good job of making a start-up extremely relevant in a competitive market. I’d dare say they have been disruptive. And of course they were bought for a zillion dollars by Juniper. So what is The Mist Advantage when it comes to these presentation-oriented events?

Their short history.

Sure, they have decent technology, and even if you get tired of AI-everything in the company’s messaging, that is obviously working for them. But it’s what Mist DOESN’T have that’s just as significant to their appeal: they don’t have years and years of messaging fog and technical bloat to overcome. Their story is still fresh, and when you sit down to listen to them, your mind doesn’t involuntarily think about their long history of bugs, frequently changing “campaigns” and named networking frameworks, and all the ways customers have been frustrated with their licensing and support. Because… that history doesn’t exist yet.

The irony with Mist is that many of their key corporate players have come from companies that DO suffer from the effects of simply having a long history, and were likely personally responsible on some level for at least some of the baggage left behind at the companies they left. Such is life in Silly Valley, and I applaud anyone who recreates themselves and learns from the past.

How long will the Mist story remain untainted by it’s own longevity? This will be an interesting question to watch play out. But I have yet to hear of any customer switching FROM having a Mist WLAN to a legacy vendor, and the continual development of products and underlying magic is impressive on Mist’s part as evidenced by what you’ll see in the MFD videos.

Yellow Card Thrown

I recommend that anyone interested in Mist or wireless networking in general watch the Mobility Field Day videos from the company’s presentations. These folks know their stuff, and the enthusiasm is palpable. But I do have to call out one thing that didn’t set well, and sounded maybe a bit beneath the Mist Team.

The day before Mist presented, Aruba Networks showed their Wi-Fi 6E AP630, a fairly ground-breaking offering that brings real-world networking in new 6 GHz spectrum to the wireless space. For months now we’ve all been giddy about 6 GHz being made available for use by the FCC, so Aruba giving the world an early 6E AP and being able to show what it does in a controlled environment is a good thing.

I’ve heard every single vendor so far at Mobility Field Day 6, including Mist, say things like “you gotta start somewhere” or “this is just our first step towards blah blah blah”- reasonable utterances for companies who need to innovate or wither. So when the topic of 6E access points came up and Mist seemingly slighted Aruba for putting out a lowly 2×2 6E AP while Mist has nothing to show yet in 6E, it seemed a bit low-brow. The comment was noticed by a few other folks out there as well, and I’m curious your take on this if you happened to catch the dialogue.

Aruba Said the Right Words Regarding Dashboards

I wanna be a dashboard ranger
Live a life of guts and danger
I better stop before this song gets stranger…

Ah, dashboards. We got ’em these days, in quantity. We got so many freakin dashboards we need a dashboard to keep track of our dashboards when it comes to networking. But beyond dashboards, we got… AI.

That’s right- we got Artificial Intelligence, baby. And it’s teamed up with Dashboards, Inc. to make sure we have ALL KINDS OF STUFF to worry about. And maybe, if we’re lucky, some time those alerts will actually be actionable…

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m dashboard-jaded. I’ve seen many dashboards from market leaders that cost a fortune (they gotta make money, no fault there), that are fraught with Chicken-Little noise that is so overwhelming and uncorroborated by any other practical metric that they become one more Glass of Pain that gets ignored. Will AI help that? The answer will depend on how that AI is coded- like does the team behind the AI actually GET that endless petty alerts aren’t really a good thing?

Which brings us back to REAL intelligence… and Aruba Networks at Mobility Field Day 6. In particular, the presentation on what Aruba calls AIOPS– their version of system monitoring, root cause analysis, system adjustment, etc. This is something all the major vendors are doing these days, and all make sure that “AI” is sprinkled liberally in the marketing so you know that you are good to go. Unless you’re not, because the AI flags a bunch of stuff you don’t care about that takes you away from real work.

But Robin Jellum at Aruba said something profound in it’s simplicity as he presented on AIOPS… The exact wording escapes me, but Robin alluded to the fact that we all get bombarded with data. There’s no shortage of it in today’s network systems. But turning that data into MEANINGFUL alerts versus just lots of red and yellow dots to get lost in is the challenge, and Aruba recognizes that gratuitous, copious amounts of alerting on transient stuff does no one any good.

As a customer, I don’t want to buy ALERTS by the pound. I want to buy INFORMATION that comes from my data. It’s nice to hear Aruba recognize the difference. Time will tell if AIOPS can deliver.

Contemplations on Large-Scale Cloud Wi-Fi in Higher Education

For so many years, the Wi-Fi story at most campuses has been pretty similar: hundreds or thousands of access points connect to some number of controllers, and it’s all managed by a network management system. Sounds simple enough, but this basic formula of WLAN building blocks has a number of implications that many of us who keep these networks up frequently get weary of. I recently took part in a panel discussion webinar where some notable wireless network managers and architects from the higher ed space discussed these implications. Let me share what we talked about, and we’ll see if any of it resonates with you- and I’m sure that you’d agree that the topics covered here certainly apply well beyond higher ed.

Mist Systems Hosts the Panel Discussion
Mist Systems isn’t the first company to bring cloud-managed wireless to market, but they do offer some fairly comprehensive strategies for those interested in different options. During the panel session, we talked with Bryan Ward from Dartmouth College and Brian Stephens from MIT. Both of these gents are now using Mist for their respective campus WLAN environments, albeit in different topologies. Rounding out the panel was Rowell Dionicio of Packet6.com, Wes Purvis and Jussi Kiviniemi (Mist Product Management team), and myself. Though Rowell and I both have deep backgrounds in higher ed wireless, we joined this session as independent consultants.

The Layer 2 Elephant in the Room
Back in the day when controllers first hit the market, they gave the WLAN world a major gift at Layer 2. With “fat APs”, any VLAN in use by the access point needs to be part of a trunk on the Ethernet uplink. But when the AP is controller based, a single management VLAN can be used to encapsulate a number of VLANs using CAPWAP tunnels. Using controllers allows for a much simpler L2 paradigm from the perspective of AP-uplink switch and switchport configurations- by an order of magnitude in large environments. To me, this is perhaps one of the most significant single benefits of using controller-based WLAN, and is one potential obstacle when going to a cloud-managed model. Old L2 concerns come back to haunt us when the controller gives way to a cloud-managed management plane, and not all vendors have an answer to the dilemma.

During our discussion, we learned that Dartmouth re-engineered their LAN network and embraced configuration automation to reduce the L2 admin burden when they migrated away from their old Cisco controllers to Mist’s cloud-managed WLAN. By contrast, MIT’s timeline for WLAN upgrades required that they NOT re-engineer their L2 environment, meaning they needed a solution to the L2 dilemma.

How do you take advantage of CAPWAP/similiar tunnel terminations afforded by controllers, when you are abandoning controllers? Mist provides an appliance called the Mist Edge which allows for termination of AP-management tunnels and VLAN aggregation, while still keeping the rest of Management Plane functions out in the cloud. This option allowed MIT to quickly get their Wi-Fi moved to the cloud paradigm while preserving their legacy LAN topology.

There was a lot of good discussion about what exactly a controller is versus solutions like Mist Edge and similar building blocks from other vendors. Wes presented this graphic to guide discussion:

Why Else is the Controller Construct so Important When Considering Cloud W-Fi?
Aside from Layer 2 concerns, we heard from both MIT and Dartmouth the various ways their admin time has gotten more productive since they jettisoned controllers. We all spoke of reliability and such, and there is no doubt that a move to the cloud simplifies major administrative tasks. I’ve used cloud-managed networking in almost twenty branch locations of varying sizes for at least a decade, and I can say that not having to upkeep both controller code and quirky, feature-bloated management servers is nothing short of liberating.

The panel as a group seemed to agree that many WLAN professionals get hung up on the loss of nerd-knobs and command-line deep debug capabilities when they consider a move away from controllers to cloud. I wasn’t the only one to vocalize that often the deeper debugs we do on controllers are when we are troubleshooting controller code for TAC rather than actually trying to figure out Wi-Fi or client issues (this gets extremely old). Dartmouth’s Bryan Ward spoke highly of the ease of use and effectiveness of Mist’s API capabilities from first-hand experience when deeper-than-GUI information is needed, while MIT’s Brian Stephens reflected on the Mist interface being comprehensive enough for daily use. Both perspectives are good news for the controller-weary. Competing cloud systems have similar API functionality, and one point of analysis at evaluation time is always “is there the right balance between GUI and API?” from the usability perspective.

A Lot to Consider, Digest
For me, this discussion does scrape off a significant portion of apprehension about potentially moving a large WLAN of many thousands of access points to the cloud-managed paradigm. (In my perfect world, I’d be able to keep my existing very expensive controller-based APs and use them with another vendor’s cloud solution- but the world doesn’t work that way, and likely never really will at enterprise scale.) We covered a lot of ground, with these among some of the other details to ponder:

• Rowell asked a great question- can we make a Mist Edge in VM? Wes replied that it could be done, but most customers don’t.
• Bryan Ward pointed out that SNMP completely goes away with the Mist deployment.
• Brian Stephens made the case that so many other enterprise systems are moving to a cloud-managed model that taking Wi-Fi there really isn’t that much of a leap.
• We all talked about the “what if your Internet connection goes down?” I’ll say that your Mist Wi-Fi will be fine during the downtime, but let you hear the rest of the conversation for yourself when you watch the session.
• We also hit on how funding changes from Capex to Opex with cloud management, and the value of scripting skills for network admins

There’s a lot more to hear, and it’s better firsthand so I hope you spend an hour or so and watch it. I will close by saying this: regardless of what system you are contemplating, you really have to do an honest eval with it the way you would actually use it daily, and you also have to talk to real-world customers that have been empowered to speak freely about the good and less-than-great of the solution you’re interested in.

This panel discussion was especially useful to me because Bryan and Brian have already gone down a road I think about often, and Rowell’s insights are always right on. I’m now better equipped to think about the WLAN future of environments that I manage.

If you missed one of the embedded links above, find the webinar here.