Aruba Instant Review - WFD2

Aruba had quite a few different technologies and products on display at Wireless Field Day 2. The one I would like to focus on for this post is Aruba Instant. (Today I'll be sticking to a high-level review and saving my technical testing results for another post.)

Many people know Aruba as a hardware controller-based wireless solution. Instant moves away from a hardware controller and replaces it with a virtual controller that resides on the access points themselves. This allows for distributed forwarding, low cost controller redundancy, and elimination of feature licenses (thank you).

Here is a brief video demonstration I recorded showing the administrative interface:

The Good

There are several things I like about the new Instant architecture: 

• The UI has been cleaned up considerably. It is much more intuitive and easy to navigate than the controller UI. 
• No feature licensing. 
• Cheap controller redundancy. When a number of IAPs are forming a single network, one of the APs acts as the virtual controller. If it fails, another one takes it's place.
• Auto-join. This feature allows you to add additional IAPs to the network and have them automatically pull the config of the existing virtual controller. 

The Bad

Life in an instant world isn't all roses. There are some things that I didn't like so much: 

• Lack of granular QoS controls. For example, you have 3 choices of networks: employee, voice, and guest. Voice networks prioritize all traffic as voice instead of just actual voice traffic. 
• OS Fingerprinting is available but only as an FYI. Currently, there is no way leverage this information to affect policy or access.
• Lack of alerting capabilities. While there is an alerts page, there is no way to natively generate email alerts for administrators. To accomplish this, you must use SNMP traps, syslog scrapes, or AirWave.

The Ugly

The only truly ugly thing is that the Instant UI hasn't been ported over to the hardware controller UI yet. (We've been informed that work on this is underway).

Final Thoughts

Instant is an interesting foray into the hardware controllerless arena by Aruba. The solution is easy to deploy and configure. While it looks like they've made a concerted effort to include as many important features as possible, they have clearly had to remove some functionality due to processing and memory limitations. In its current state, I see Instant fitting nicely into a smaller environment that doesn't have a large IT team or budget.  

Daniel

Disclosure: As a delegate of Wireless Field Day 2, I attended a presentation at Aruba Networks HQ where I received an evaluation IAP-135 and RAP-2. I am also currently employed by an Aruba Networks partner VAR.

Meraki Systems Manager Review - WFD2

This the first of a series of posts containing my thoughts and reviews of the vendors and products present at #WFD2.

One of the interesting products or features that Meraki demonstrated at Wireless Field Day 2 was Systems Manager. Basically, Systems Manager is an MDM solution which is baked into the Meraki Cloud Controller. Here is a 5 minute video demonstration I've created showing some of the features:

I think the ability to do MDM and application management directly from your WLAN administration console is pretty slick. Meraki has built an impressively simple tool which is easy to use, and has a moderate set of features. The tool, which is included with the enterprise subscription, requires no additional licenses or upgrades.

Right now, in the words of Sam Clements, Meraki has done 20% of the work to get 80% of the benefits with Systems Manager. That is to say, it definitely covers the basics of MDM but there are certainly some additions required to get the last 20% of effectiveness as a solution.

Some features I would like to see are:

• Ability to block or remove installed applications. [Update: This feature actually is currently available. Please see the comment by Pablo for details.]
• Android support.
• Ability to provision WLAN settings.
• More options for email alerts.
• More message logging functionality. (This is interesting from a privacy standpoint since it would be logging to the 3rd party cloud vendor.)

Issues and Limitations during testing:

• Remote desktop didn't work everytime. Sometimes it just died on me.
• My iMac reported no applications installed. This might just be because Systems Manager only queries apps on iOS devices though. [Update: Turns out my Mac should be reporting the apps but isn't for some reason. More investigation on my part required.]
• I didn't test a Windows machine.
• While I tested the remote lock function (it took about 20 seconds), I did not test the remote wipe functionality.

Final Thoughts

Meraki's Systems Manager is impressive in it's simplicity. It's a great solution for anyone who is currently running a Meraki network and is looking for a straight-forward, and basic MDM solution for Windows, Mac OS X, and iOS devices. However, the lack of message/image logging, data encryption controls, and other advanced MDM features certainly limit the applicable scope of the solution; for now anyway. Meraki tends to roll out innovations fairly quickly so it'll be interesting to watch this product evolve in 2012.

Daniel

Disclosure: As a delegate of Wireless Field Day 2, I attended a presentation at Meraki HQ where I received an evaluation access point and cloud controller licensing. I am also currently employed by a Meraki partner VAR.