Which secure wireless vendor do you use

[plexer]

Looking into implementing some form of secure centrally managed system for my wireless network.

 

Just wondering what others have and how expensive it was.

[marco84]

I have a managed 3com solution. with 57 APs to provide coverage for the whole school.

PM me if you want to know more info about the financial side of things mate.

[Ric_]

BlueSocket here... slowly adding my 25 APs to provide 100%-ish coverage with high density in a couple of areas. Currently have 11 APs up and it works great

[Ben_Stanton]

Out of interest, what are the benefits of having your AP's managed externally via a 3rd party? What are the cases for and against?

 

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, i'm just curious at the reasoning behind it...

 

Ben

[marco84]

By a managed wireless solution i meant that we have a centerally managed system. So the server deploys all config settings to all APs over the network. Rather than having to do it individually on each AP.

[plexer]

Ben: I'm not advocating an external system all of these are something that you have installed within school wether it is a hardware switch or a piece of software that manages your wireless network. Want to make a change to all of them just change your template and push the new settings out type of thing. Upgrade all the firmwares in one go rather than doing it manually on each wap.

 

Ben

[Ben_Stanton]

That's what you get for reading the post wrong! Really not a good day. Actually, really not a good week!

 

It is all much clearer to me now - it didn't make much sense, that's why I queried it initially. Why on earth would you get somebody else to manage your system.

 

Ben

[plexer]

I've just found a sensibly priced software solution to centrally managing configuration, reporting and other things in the form of Wifi Manager from:

 

http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/wifi-manager/

 

The uk reseller is:

 

http://www.manageengine.co.uk/

 

Ben

[plexer]

Could the person that voted for hp get in touch please?

 

Thanks,

 

Ben

[browolf]

I have a managed 3com solution. with 57 APs to provide coverage for the whole school.

PM me if you want to know more info about the financial side of things mate.

 

same here

[Ric_]

@plexer: I looked at the HP offering and it was no where near as flexible as the Cisco/BlueSocket offerings. I love my Procurve switches but the wireless kit didn't really cut it for me.

[plexer]

Ric_: Thanks for that we allready have a dozen or so HP 420's as we have been a fat AP site so far.

 

I'm happy with my security setup and pushing out my wireless policies via gpo but what I'm looking for is a central management system of the AP for firmwares and updates rather than anything else so just thought the HP s/w might be ok.

 

Otherwise I'm looking at wifi manage at the moment.

 

Ben

[GrumbleDook]

We have a Cisco solution here ... WLAN Controller (4000 series) and the 1000 series thin APs ... and we have converted our existing 1200s to use the controller too.

 

It manages things extremely well here, but we are at the limit of 25 at the moment ... and we need more ... some we have an expansion coming in after April ... that will give us up to 75 APs.

 

We do have an issue with Macs connecting but that is partly due to power regulation of the AP and routinely resetting them sorts this. Once we have a few more APs in place we can balance it out a bit better.

[psydii]

'Other'

 

Extreme managed wireless (WM100 at core, 30 AP750s at the edge)

 

Why? Cheaper than cisco and aruba, same vendor as our core and our Infrastructure partner promised it would work. It does.

[monkey_boy]

We use Netgear. I'd reccommend them.

[Ric_]

@Grumbledook: The limit to the number of APs is one of the reasons that I discounted Cisco and 3COM... having to buy license packs for a system that will supposedly support 400 concurrent clients is daft, especially if you need high density.

 

@All: As a BTW, the BlueSocket kit will manage the big name APs although I cannot comment on this.