Airespace offers switches that provide functionality similar to Aruba and Trapeze, but it proposed using its Airespace 4100 WLAN Appliance in our environment. The 4100 connected to our building backbone switch through one or both of its Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Airespace 1200 APs communicate with the 4100 over the existing Layer 2 Ethernet infrastructure. The Airespace Control System software can manage as many as 25 Airespace appliances and their associated APs.
Although their list price is about half that of Trapeze's offering, the Airespace APs appear well-made, sporting a unique and flexible antenna as well as external antenna jacks. The 1200 APs support 802.11b and 802.11a, and we had no interoperability problems during our testing. The APs are also software-upgradable to support 802.11g.
Airespace walks the line between automatic and traditional site design. Although the company offers some limited RF prediction tools, they are not as capable as those offered by Trapeze. The tools let you make an educated guess about AP placement, but the company still recommends conducting a manual verification. Determining picture-perfect AP placement isn't as crucial as it is with rival products, however, because AireWave Director software, which comes bundled with the 4100, dynamically compensates for interference, coverage holes and user density by adjusting power output levels and channel allocation and leveraging load-balancing capabilities. Airespace calls this the "Intelligent RF Control Plane" and says it was designed to optimize RF performance while maintaining security.
Unlike other products that can be reconfigured manually or at defined intervals, Airespace's system works in real time, though admins can retain control by requiring a system prompt before changes are made and by allowing for manual changes if dynamic ones aren't desired. And Airespace says its products perform real-time analysis of the RF environment by the same 1200 APs that handle data traffic, with performance degradation of less than 1 percent.
Airespace's security architecture impressed us. To increase the likelihood of a secure installation from day one, the 4100's default configuration supports only SSH (Secure Shell) and HTTPS connections, though telnet and HTTP can be enabled manually. Similarly, the box defaults to support the more secure SNMP, version 3.
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