Neal Shelton, network engineering supervisor for the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, looks to the Airwave Management Platform to help him deal with the daily ups and downs of managing the district’s 8500 APs that comprise its wireless network.

FCPS’s is a classic mixed-vendor installation, with a combination of Cisco 1121, 1131, and 1300 APs and 4402 controllers and Aruba AP 125 access points and 3300 controllers. It was an economical reason for bringing the Aruba gear into the Cisco mix – the Aruba gear costs less – and because FCPS network engineers prefer Aruba’s 802.11n solution to Cisco’s.

Shelton says FCPS initially turned to AMP for a wide variety of reasons. Those include its easy end-user interface, its reporting functionality is better than the individual vendors, its ability to handle future multi-vendor solutions, its troubleshooting client/access point capabilities, its configuration control and its affordable price.

FCPS does not use Cisco’s WCS management platform, which would be the default for the Cisco gear, noting a problem in being unable to manage large groups of users. On weekdays during the school year, it is not unusual to have more than 16,000 simultaneous wireless users, and a platform that can handle that load in a mixed-vendor environment was at the top of his list of requirements.

Among the many tasks he’s delegated to AMP are firmware upgrades (including converting his older Cisco APs to thin mode), rogue AP detection and general status monitoring. Shelton keeps the main page of AMP up on his computer screen at all times.

Shelton had no complaints regarding AMP overall, giving the product special kudos for its reliability and flexibility in a FCPS’s very challenging operational environment. But he did have a few requests for enhancements, including the ability to change names for multiple access points from one page and set primary and secondary controllers to a specific number of access points so that load balancing can be in place. He also cited a desire for more user-friendliness – in general, mirroring the issues we noted in our review of AMP. 

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