Ruckus Wireless announced the availability of Ruckus Cloud Wi-Fi, a wireless local area network (WLAN) management-as-a-service offer working on the latest Ruckus public cloud platform.
Ruckus, which is a part of Brocade, claims that the Cloud Wi-Fi will offer distributed organizations with limited IT resources to set up, monitor and manage a high-performance multi-site WLAN of any size.
The user interface capable of handling access points (APs) of major operators will feature cloud simplicity without affecting Wi-Fi performance, said the release.
Dan Rabinovitsj, chief operating officer, Ruckus Wireless Business Unit, Brocade, said: “Customers shouldn’t have to be locked into a single architecture—if they need to change, their APs should change with them. With Ruckus Cloud Wi-Fi, customers don’t need to make these tradeoffs anymore.”
The company boasts of a range of deployment options like the public cloud, data center or private cloud, hardware or virtual appliance, and controller-less variables, with this announcement.
The cloud-managed WLAN market is boosting with current deployments in place. Ruckus Cloud support for in-building LTE service and Brocade ICX switches will also be launched soon providing an integrated platform with easy configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting of both wired and wireless networks.
The WLAN market growth is expected to continue, in part due to increased demand for the well-established benefits of cloud-managed WLAN services.
Nolan Greene, senior research analyst, network infrastructure at IDC, said: “Ruckus Cloud Wi-Fi offers a simple-to-deploy, less time-intensive alternative to on-premises controller architectures and will enable even the most IT-constrained organizations to easily manage dozens or even hundreds of sites.”
Main features of the product include Wi-Fi performance claiming to outperform competing products in third-party testing, while excelling in challenging user density, interference and physical environments alongside deploying fewer APs with this product.
Customers can also use same number of APs to address growing requirements. The product while sporting an intent-driven user interface, designed to display only the data the user needs for a task with system automation, enables IT to cut time for managing and status-checking the WLAN, even for untrained personnel.
It also comes with a mobile app enabling IT managers to access network info on mobiles and receive notifications for issues with correction from mobile location possible. The cloud-scale nature allows Cloud Wi-Fi customers to add APs and sites, with ease in scaling without complexity increasing with the number of APs.
The Ruckus Cloud infrastructure will report six months of KPIs, ranging from low-level per-radio airtime utilization to layer-7 application visibility, along with AP investment protection, wherein a Cloud Wi-Fi deployment can be reused in any of Ruckus deployment options.
Ruckus has recently eliminated the network latency issues associated with delivering networking services via the cloud using a more efficient SmartCell architecture that also saves money by reducing the number of access points an organization needs to deploy to cover a particular area by half, on average, when compared to competitors.
Revenue for the first quarter of 2016 was $100.6 million for the company, an increase of 22.5 percent from the first quarter of 2015.
It recently announced OpenG technology to address the challenge of in-building cellular coverage and capacity, joining coordinated shared spectrum, such as 3.5 GHz in the U.S., with neutral host-capable small cells to enable cost-effective, ubiquitous in-building LTE coverage.
With wireless networks employed by end users to access applications and services, it will be simpler to manage access points via a centralized platform than that of a networking vendor. Also, owing to the rise of VNF functionality in the cloud, network services delivery is changing, day by day.
