Harrisonburg City Public Schools, a 4,400-student school system in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, is deploying Aerohive's wireless LAN system-wide. The wireless LAN will be deployed across all ten facilities within the school system, including a high school, two middle schools, five elementary schools, a special education center, and an administrative office.
An in-depth case study of Harrisonburg City Public Schools' Aerohive deployment is available here.
The Aerohive wireless LAN replaced an assortment of consumer-grade wireless access points that were unreliable and difficult to manage. The old wireless LAN failed to maintain adequate coverage, lacked a centralized management system, created performance issues within the schools' mobile labs, and had faulty security features. A task force formed by the school system evaluated wireless solutions from Aerohive, Aruba, Cisco, Trapeze, and Xirrus and ultimately selected Aerohive based on its resiliency, ease of management, security features, and cost.
"Aerohive has given us a highly resilient wireless network that's both easy to deploy and manage, with the capabilities to meet our needs far into the future," said Dwayne Hottinger, network administrator, Harrisonburg City Public Schools. "Considering all the features we sought, Aerohive was the most cost-effective solution. Choosing Aerohive was a unanimous decision."
Top Priority: Resiliency
Hottinger's top priority for the new wireless LAN was resiliency, as network failures consumed valuable instruction time and caused other disruptions. Aerohive's unique cooperative control wireless LAN architecture increases resiliency by eliminating network controllers that create single points of failure. Resiliency is further increased by the wireless mesh networking capabilities that are included in all Aerohive access points (HiveAPs), enabling them to automatically route around network failures.
Ease of Deployment and Management
After resiliency, the top selection criteria were ease of deployment and management. With just a limited amount of assistance from Aerohive, the customer's network administrator deployed the new wireless LAN himself. HiveManager, Aerohive's network management system, simplifies deployment by automatically discovering HiveAPs as they are added to the network and then pushing configuration information to them.
The network administrator has also been pleased with the simplicity of managing the network. "If someone reports an issue, I can look at the HiveManager, see where they are connected, review the log files, view the topology, and determine whether I need to add or move a HiveAP for better coverage," said Hottinger.
The new Aerohive wireless LAN was divided into separate networks. One provides secure faculty access to the student management system; another is for a library cataloging system that enables wireless scanning to check books in and out; and a third is for guest access.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
