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November 27, 2007

WLAN Market Claims vs Reality

There have been enterprise WLAN vendor claims recently relating to market performance and market share. In particular, Aruba Networks has been making bold statements about major market share gains at the expense of Cisco. Wanted to provide, to quote that food critic from Ratatouille (ok -- yes, I've watched it twice recently -- my kids love it) "some perspective"

The Claim: Aruba's CEO, Dominic Orr, claimed on their earnings call last week that his company was rapidly gaining market share in the Enterprise WLAN market.

Some perspective: The Dell'Oro Group, a widely respected industry analyst firm, just released new market share numbers last week. The results: The Dell’Oro Group reported that Cisco extended its market share lead to 63 percent in the Enterprise WLAN market, which includes WLAN controllers and access points. This performance came at the expense of the No. 2 (Aruba) and No. 3 (Motorola) vendors in the market, who both hold market share positions of under 10 percent and showed sequential declines in revenue from Q2 2007 to Q3 2007.

Some more perspective: In the critical WLAN controller market, Dell’Oro reported that Cisco sequentially gained 4 points of share in Q3, while the distant No. 2 player Aruba Networks lost more than 3 points of share due to declining controller shipments. In the past two years since the introduction of Cisco’s Unified Wireless Network, Cisco has gone from 31% share to today's 54%. Aruba has gone from 9% to 13% over the same time period.

And from another source: Synergy Research, another respected, indepedent authority, reported Enterprise WLAN market share for Cisco of 64 percent. Synergy also reports that Cisco’s share has grown from 46 percent in Q1 2005, the quarter when Cisco acquired Airespace, to the most recent quarter share at 64 percent. These 18 points of market share gain over the past three years significantly outpace all competitors, which according to Synergy all individually fall below 10 percent of share.

Everything listed above is based on independent, non-commissioned analyst data, with permission given by each firm for me to cite here.

www.delloro.com
www.srgresearch.com

My point? That Cisco continues to strongly lead this market, and grow its share over time? Well .. yes. But also to provide a counter to claims that big companies can't be agile and compete in fast-growing markets. Both topics were addressed by Aruba's CEO in what I felt was in misleading fashion, particularly in light of the data just released above. So I post this not with chest-thumping, but to offer up a more facts-based response to some public statements. Plus, it's fun when the numbers are on your side :)

Posted by Ben Gibson at 11:36 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 25, 2007

Strange Vendor Claims on 802.11n and PoE

A story was published last week http://www.techworld.com/mobility/features/index.cfm?featureID=3830&pagtype=samecatsamechan that delves into what I think is a rather sloppy argument from one of our competitors on 802.11n and how to deploy a dual-radio .11n AP with adequate power. We've taken a close look at the issue, and developed a system-level solution with Cisco Catalyst switches to autonegotiate the appropriate power to run a dual-radio 802.11n AP at full performance.

Our erstwhile competitor Aruba boasts the "only 802.11n AP that operates with standard PoE." Yet when you really take a closer look, what they mean here is that their AP can operate, but at reduced performance and capacity. Their story gets stranger when you read recent, completely inconsistent press comments from Aruba, essentially warning against 802.11n deployments altogether. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39290082,00.htm The best part -- there's no sign that the company is shipping product any time soon.

My other favorite competitive claim by the same folks is their new "80 Gbps controller". Sounds great, until you realize that if you actually want to encrypt your traffic over an Aruba WLAN -- and what customer wouldn't -- that same Aruba controller, which handles all encryption centrally, slows down to 16 Gbps. Kind of like looking at a speedometer -- sure, 210 mph looks cool, but it doesn't mean a thing.

Posted by Ben Gibson at 07:20 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 08, 2007

Passing notes with paper airplanes and resilient MACs

Here's the fact folks - I'm getting married... in three months. In order to ensure that I'm going to be an awesome husband, I've been going to marriage class. Unfortunately, sitting in class made me regress to my younger years when I spent time honing my airplane making skills.

I don't think it makes me a bad student, it just means that I'm one of the people that suffer from "Adult A-D-D", which my Fiance finds somewhat amusing.

Originally I was just passing notes to her, but then the instructor caught me and separated us (what's up with our marriage instructor separating us)? So after we were separated I started making paper airplanes especially when the payload of one of my paper airplane 'notes' was destined for her.

She giggled.

The instructor didn't.

She took the paper away from me and I was left with no way to entertain Deborah (my fiance)... except for my cell phone in my pocket. I whipped it out and started texting her. Here's what I wrote: "Aren't I a loser for passing notes in marriage class." I hit the send button and waited for her to react to the incoming message (She knew I was sending her a message)."

To my surprise it took a few seconds - it was much slower than physically passing a note (packet) - it was even slower then throwing the paper airplane.

It was then that I realized how 'network like' my stupidity was. When the physical layer link was interrupted, I chose another way of sending data. Each took a bit more time and they were progressively more costly (NOTE: as part of my personal GREEN initiative I only pass notes on recycled paper).

What does this all mean? Well I'd like a solution that solves this problem transparently for a network connection. I'm tired of having to change network connections, having it change all the time, and then having to reconfigure them. I want a solution that is as reslient as I am.

Posted by Matt Glenn at 09:48 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 05, 2007

How to defeat the laws of physics

In my blog posting on enterprise WLAN, I talked about how the 2.4 spectrum simply does not have enough capacity for large scale deployments. My thesis was that users should really be looking to maximize the 5Ghz spectrum for their use (while recognizing that legacy devices will continue to exist in the 2.4 spectrum). Following this article, some vendors argued that existing WLAN architectures could not meet the needs of the enterprise, and the only valid architecture was one that used the same channel across all APs. They claim that a single channel architecture is the only one that can support fast roaming and provides maximum performance. In this blog series, I will explain why this is myth.

Vendors of these single channel architectures claim that handoffs are too slow and cannot support the needs of real-time applications. I think it is important that we be intellectually honest when we discuss roaming speeds. First, I admit that in the old world of stand-alone APs, where no centralized coordination existed to help improve roaming times, this was an issue. There are two main functions that a client needs to do when it decides it will roam. First, it needs to find an alternative access point and then needs to provide its credentials to gain access to the network.

Finding a candidate access point typically requires a client to scan all of the available channels, and on a dual mode (2.4Ghz and 5Ghz device), this is quite a number of channels. This process can be sped up through some innovation on the client side, but is best when it is assisted by the infrastructure. Cisco supports the neighbor discovery extension, which allows an access point to transmit its neighboring APs, along with their channels. This information can be used by clients to minimize the number of channels to scan.

Once the client has found a new access point, it needs to request access, which includes the authentication process. The issue with re-authentication is the fact that it requires that the backend RADIUS server be involved, which increases latency, and the overall cost of the handoff. Eliminating the authentication process altogether, and only relying on a series of transactions between the client and the access point, is ideal. To do this, Cisco uses CCKM to allow a device to simply re-key, using information that was distributed during the original authentication phase. CCKM is supported on both the autonomous and unified wireless architectures, and the latter can support roaming times of sub-20ms.

Cisco is working with the IEEE 802.11 to create an industry standards. Neighbor discovery will be available in 802.11k, while 802.11r will include CCKM- like features. This standard involves many of the consumer and enterprise class access point vendors, all of which are working diligently to provide these technologies to their customers quickly. Given that we've already proven that handoffs times can support the needs of real-time applications, I can only assume that the argument being made by these vendors is against access point technologies as they existed five years ago.

Next time, we will focus on RF related issues brought up by these vendors.

Posted by Pat Calhoun at 07:15 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)