WIRELESS NETWORKS

NonStop Wireless for the Always-on Enterprise

Excedo Networks wireless solutions deliver unparalleled reliability, performance, manageability and security allowing NonStop Wireless for always-on enterprises.

NonStop Wireless means Mission-critical Mobility

As enterprises recognize the benefits of mobility, wireless LANs are evolving from a “convenience network”, into the de-facto access layer to the enterprise network. Whether it’s nurses getting voice and messaging while on the move, or retail staff doing price checks and inventory management from anywhere in the store, or a teacher being able to deliver classes outdoors, almost every industry has highly mobile workers that can benefit from uninterrupted connectivity anywhere.

The growing dependence on wireless for primary connectivity, places new demands on the WLAN infrastructure – demands for a secure, high performance, highly reliable and easy-to-manage wireless network.

Excedo Networks works with Trapeze Networks' Smart Mobile architecture that ensures mission-critical mobility for applications such as voice communications, patient care, point of sale and location tracking, while delivering uninterrupted campus-wide network access, even in failure conditions - that's NonStop Wireless.

Superior Performance and Scalability

Unlike other WLAN systems that rely solely on centralized forwarding at the WLAN controller, the Trapeze Smart Mobile architecture also allows Distributed Forwarding at the Access Point to offload WLAN controllers and optimize traffic flows for latency sensitive applications such as voice. But Trapeze's scalability advantage does not end there. Trapeze has implemented many other innovations to maximize bandwidth availability, and control utilization.

QoS profiles and bandwidth limits can be set on a per SSID or per user basis giving granular control over which applications get most bandwidth and priority treatment. In addition, patent pending Band Steering features transparently cause 802.11a-capable devices to use the 5Ghz band, recovering 30-40% more usable capacity, without requiring any client or network configuration changes. Trapeze is also unique in enabling automatic Client Load Balancing across multiple access points, even between Access Points managed by different controllers.

Complete Security for Maximum Protection

Thanks to the Wi-Fi Alliance and IEEE all the early wireless LAN security concerns have been laid to rest, and some say WLANs are now, even more secure than most wired networks. Since 2002 Trapeze has played a lead role in the standards bodies and has been among the first to implement new standards that relate to security and voice service enablement. Trapeze continues its leadership today, as the elected chair of IEEE 802.11 Task Group as well as the chair of two other Wi-Fi Alliance Task Groups covering Network Management and Security.

Trapeze provides the highest levels of security for both voice and data including the WPA/WPA2 standards and all WMM subsets, and is one of the few WLAN vendors with a validated FIPS 140-2 certified solution. Trapeze also offers enhanced WIDS/WIPS protection, to prevent even the most determined hackers, and with SmartPass 7.0, now offers the industry's most advanced Access Control software, enabling up-to-the-second dynamic adjustment of users' access privileges based on their location, time and date, traffic, and more. With its best-in-class Real-Time Location Services technology, only Trapeze offers location-aware security, as well as powerful asset tracking applications that can deliver profound efficiencies in workflow and inventory management.

Award-Winning WLAN Management

With its unique three-dimensional predictive planning capabilities, Trapeze Networks delivers easiest WLAN deployment in the industry, without resorting to gimmicks such as “virtual cell” that only ease deployment at the expense of performance. In fact, Trapeze's planning takes into consideration both environmental conditions and WLAN capacity requirements, in order to compute the optimum placement and configuration of access points for best price / performance.

Unlike other vendors who added network management as an after-thought, Trapeze Networks led with advanced WLAN management capabilities from day one. Now in its 7th generation, RingMaster is a world class, award-winning management platform that makes it extremely easy for a network manager to plan, deploy, configure and monitor every aspect of their multi-site networks completely remotely, all from a single console.

Unmatched System-Level Reliability

High-availability demands system-level resilience, not just device level resilience. With the latest evolution of its Smart Mobile architecture, Trapeze Networks raises the bar on reliability - delivering NonStop availability with Hitless Failover. The traditional approach to redundancy is to have a fully-loaded, fully-configured device ready to back up any other device which may fail. But many-to-one redundancy is inefficient, as 99% of the time, the back up device sits idle.

Trapeze’s approach is different - think of it as controller virtualization. A group of controllers is configured as a Virtual Controller Cluster that allows each controller to act as a backup for any other. This unique many-to-many redundancy approach keeps all devices in service, so you know they work. It also eliminates the need for expensive backup devices that rarely get used, and makes full use of access point licenses spread over multiple controllers. But much more important is the unmatched reliability benefits of hitless failover for active sessions. Because WLAN controller failure no longer has any impact on user sessions, this capability allows instant capacity scaling, and unscheduled in-service upgrades, all with zero downtime – this is simply not possible with other vendors systems.

If you need a wireless non-stop solution, talk with Excedo Networks!