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Managing the WLAN at Intel
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| (Wednesday, 05 December 2007) Written by Bryan Wargo |
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I had the pleasure to record a podcast with Ray Sliteris of Intel
to discuss how they manage their internal wireless LAN on a global
basis. Managing over 6,000 access points and controllers is a pretty
huge task for any corporation; these guys have the added benefit of
working for a company that is a main driver behind the entire WiFi
industry.
A few interesting items that particularly caught my attention:
1. Last year they were almost 100% autonomous access points and now
they are about 25% converted to a controller based approach. This
migration will take them several years to move entirely to a thin AP
model. My guess is most organizations are like this, they would very
much like to take advantage of the “latest and greatest” but due to
organizational inertia and network size it takes a while to make any
radical changes.
2. The biggest challenges they faced in deploying a network of this
size were creating consistent configurations and having a global
network view.
3. 802.11n is not a big push for them. They are testing this new
technology out in a few areas but they see this as a 2009 production
deployment type of technology. The big business drivier for Intel will
not necessarily be the additional throughput but rather the improved
connection reliability inherent with MIMO .
Please take a listen to the podcast and let me know what you think!
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