Infotech Lead America: Aruba Networks claims that its new wireless LANs (WLANs) software delivers up to four times better performance than a Cisco WLAN.
The new software release helps enterprises ensure consistent, predictable performance and fast recovery for today’s challenging mobile environments.
Aruba Networks is offering ArubaOS 6.1.3.4 for Aruba mobility controllers as a free software download to existing Aruba WLAN customers.
“Today’s mobility networks must accommodate the huge influx of mobile devices on the network, as well as the real-time voice and video applications that are now part of most users’ daily interactions. With this new software and our existing wireless LAN portfolio, Aruba is helping enterprises meet these challenges, providing a level of performance and resiliency that, as testing demonstrates, other wireless LAN vendors cannot match,” said Keerti Melkote, chief technology officer for Aruba Networks.
The new ArubaOS 6.1.3.4 for Aruba mobility controllers ensures high performance and minimum downtime for large-scale mobility networks that must accommodate a growing number of mobile devices and real-time mobile applications such as voice and video.
With Aruba’s approach to airtime fairness and the new ArubaOS, no single group of clients can monopolize network resources over another. Competitive testing results using a variety of client devices including smartphones, tablets and laptops in different quantities and configurations, showed that Aruba’s WLAN delivered up to four times better performance than a Cisco WLAN.
With traditional wireless LAN solutions, it can take up to 60 seconds for a single access point to recover, resulting in downtime for network users and higher maintenance costs for the enterprise. With this latest software release, Aruba’s WLAN can ensure recovery up to seven times faster than Cisco WLANs – so quick that even video conference calls stay connected in the event of a failure.
Aruba claims that it ensures that clients and applications such as Microsoft Lync, Apple FaceTime, unicast and multicast video continue to perform flawlessly and without interruption.
Aruba’s wireless LAN automatically identifies, prioritizes and protects Unified Communications (UC) applications in the presence of Wi-Fi congestion, resulting in up to 75 percent better quality for these applications.
Case Study
Regional Medical Center at Memphis (The MED) is a regional healthcare resource that has benefited from Aruba’s approach to wireless LAN resiliency. The MED includes a large hospital and four clinics serving a five-state region within 150 miles of Memphis, and also serves as one of the largest medical and surgical teaching sites for the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. With over 2,200 employees, including 500 nurses and 200 doctors, The MED relies on its Aruba WLAN to provide quality patient care around the clock.
“As we continue to increase the number of users, real-time applications and mobile devices such as our Bedside Mobile Workstations (BMWs) on the network, it becomes even more important to ensure the redundancy and resiliency of our wireless network infrastructure. Aruba’s approach to high availability was a key factor in choosing its WLAN to replace our existing Cisco wireless infrastructure. With Aruba, we have virtually eliminated our network downtime and the high cost and drain on IT resources that accompany it,” said Tony Alphier, Director of IT, Regional Medical Center at Memphis (The MED).
