Aruba Simplifies Mobile Management

According to Ben Gibson, chief marketing officer for Aruba, more IT organizations are looking to integrate access control for mobile computing devices with the wireless network infrastructure that these devices rely on to access corporate servers. That trend will become especially pronounced as more end users start bringing their own mobile computing devices to work, he said.

The new offering anchors what Aruba calls its new Mobile Virtual Enterprise Architecture (MOVE), through which Aruba plans to manage a wide variety of network services for mobile computing devices across both wired and wireless networks. Those services will include a zero-touch, self-service provisioning capability for mobile computing devices based on technology that Aruba acquired with the recent purchase of Amigopod. The Amigopod technology works across multiple vendor networks, notes Gibson, and scales to support as many as 10,000 concurrent sessions.

The S3500 series of Mobility Access Switches are tightly coupled with Aruba wireless controllers to allow polices to be shared across wired and wireless networks, said Gibson. The S3500 also simplifies VLAN management in a way that helps reduce the total cost of operating wired and wireless network infrastructure by as much as 70 percent largely due to more efficient management of network port allocation, said Gibson.

In addition, Aruba today is rolling out Mobile Device Fingerprinting, which can identify and monitor specific mobile computing devices. Through the use of Aruba Airwave network management software, IT organizations can then decide to give bandwidth priority to those devices based on the applications they are running or the role of the person using the device.