HPE Discover - Las Vegas 2016

I was invited to take part in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Discover event in Las Vegas recently. This event was overwhelmingly Data Center focused and as a result, a lot of the content was not something I could apply in practical terms.

After walking the show floor and participating in several demonstrations, my take-away was that HPE does not appear to be making the best use of the Aruba product line and the Meridian software solution. I did not see many people using the HPE app, instead relying on old fashioned face-to-face communications on the show floor. This year, the first time I launched the HPE Discover app and attempted to use it, my phone powered off and rebooted. Needless to say, I was not eager to attempt to use the app again during the event. 

I would like to have seen a big display of the location of devices on the show floor as an interactive portion of the general floor plans shown on the digital media signage on the show floor. It would have been interesting to use a touch screen interface to see the client devices, run reports on client types and client traffic utilization of the guest network as a way to showcase the Aruba wireless capabilities with Meridian. The last time I saw an impressive demonstration of the things capable with Aruba & Meridian was an Aruba Airheads conference shortly after the Meridian acquisition.

I found the small-cell partnership of Aruba Networks with Ericsson quite interesting. The Ericsson hardware is LTE & 3G, one unit is designed to be wall mounted and the Radio Dot is DAS only. AT&T and Verizon have deployed Radio Dot. As with the Cisco small cell solution, the products are getting hung up over the Service Provider approval. The big SPs are wary of giving any control over hardware procurement to any other hardware vendor.

Aruba had their lineup of new APs on display and the number and type of Ethernet ports on the access points got me to thinking. I'm dubious that the Access Point actually needs to have more than a Gigabit uplink any time soon, even if you can bond enough 5GHz channels together to offer more than a Gigabit in speed. First off, 160MHz wide channels will be a one off use case. It's not feasible to do a system wide deployment where all the access points are operating at 160MHz channels. Client devices can't achieve mondo speeds simply due to their spatial stream limitations, and the client devices that can hammer a wireless network - well, are they really hammering the network? Everyone I've spoken to in the industry says nobody (save one or two unique customers) is really hitting the maximum uplink speeds of an access point as an actual bottleneck. I get that some customers are future-proofing their networks, but by the time the client devices can beat down the multi-gigabit wifi deployed, it may already be time to refresh the access points that were deployed well ahead of the curve. Just my .02 cents.

The Aruba AP lineup lets you choose from from the AP 330 with one SmartRate (2.5GB) port, and one GB port, the 320 with two GB ports and the 310 with one GB port. The full feature comparison can be found here.

I'm grateful to HPE sending me to HPE Discover in Las Vegas. A great time was had by all! We all go the chance to learn about new offerings from HPE and have a little fun as well. Thanks Pegah!!

 

HPE Discover - London 2015

I was invited to take part in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Discover event in London recently. This event was the first expo since HP acquired Aruba. The event was much larger than I'd anticipated - there were at least 16,000 people in attendance. Dozens of demonstration zones were sprinkled throughout the show floor. 

The demonstration of MU-MIMO was well done through an animated video equating spatial streams and airtime fairness with fast, small and big cars traveling down the highway. The video was well done and would be useful for non-English speaking attendees of the event.

The show floor had stacks of networking hardware on display (in areas where there was no accompanying demonstration space) which I suspect would fall a little flat for the attendees who were not familiar with the newly aquired line of Aruba access points and wireless controllers. The diplay stack should have had signage to lead the attendee to where they can view this hardware in action or have an HP/Aruba TME explain the intracacies of the hardware.

I used the HPE Discover 2015 Tours application which was created for this event (for iOS and Android). The show floor had HPE(Aruba) bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons distributed at the thirty-eight (38) strategic locations where the self guided tour could be utilized. At first launching the app crashed when I selected Demo 1212 "Securely integrate IoT deployments". When I relaunched the app, it worked and I was able to listen to the recorded narrator or read the transcript to get more information on the demonstration spot. Out of curiosity I searched the application for the four digit number on a nearby demonstration screen to see if that demo was also part of the app. My search results were blank, so I could only assume that it was not included. I think that the app should have been programmed to indicate that my selection was invalid or that the search query was not part of the app demo program.

The Collaboration demonstration of the interactive conference room was quite compelling. The demo tablets provided to the people taking place in the demonstration allowed their pseudonyms to be welcomed aloud by Cortana which was also launching the video meeting once all of the attendees were in the room. Once the conference started, lights on the outside of the conference room turned red to indicate the room was in use. When the conference ended, all meeting notes or chat session transcripts were automatically emailed to the attendees. The combination of the Aruba BLE beacon in the conference room with the Microsoft/Cortana enablement made a compelling story for automating conference call greetings as well as distributing the meeting notes automatically post onference call.

The big announcment from HPE Discover was the Aruba BLE Sensor (in my opinion). The Aruba Sensor is a device which plugs into any electrical outlet (the plug connector types are modular and are available for any plug type). It has a BLE beacon in it as well as a wireless capabilites which allow the sensor to manage up to 10 BLE beacons. This means that if a BLE beacon requires reprogramming, physical proximity is no longer required. The Sensors are managed through a web UI and changes to nearby Aruba BLE beacons can be done over the air. It is also possible to monitor the Aruba BLE beacon status from the same web UI as well as setup notifications/alerts when BLE beacons are no longer detected or if the BLE beacon battery status changes.

It is in the roadmap to bring this Aruba Sensor application into AirWave and use the mapping/location placment of the BLE beacons from the application into the single pane of glass management GUI which is AirWave. What is interesting is that the Aruba Sensors do not require an Aruba wireless infrastructure. Since the application which allows the remote managment of the Sensors and BLE beacons is standalone, it can be used in any wireless deployment situation.

The Aruba Sensor has a small form factor with a micro USB slot as well as an on/off power button (for regulatory compliance) as well as a four pin serial port interface. The serial port is to support legacy connections as well as debugging of the sensor. The BLE beacons that the sensor can manage are either small, standalone beacons which are battery powered, or USB beacons which are supported by recent models of Aruba access points.

I sat in on the session "How tomorrow moves: Mobile-first, cloud-first networking, transforming the digital workplace" led by Dominic Wilde VP of Product Line Management for HP/Aruba and he had a guest speaker (Doug Crawford VP of Global Network Services for WB/TimeWarner) who exolled the virtues of an all wireless office and how deploying a pervasive, location aware wireless infrastructure had enabled the WB to speed the turnaround time for wardrobe requests as well as catering deliveries. These two examples alone is saving WB thousands of dollars that would've been lost due to the length of turnaround time for these tasks previously. The are working to make the WB studio even more interactive through the use of BLE beacons at the major soundstages to bring video clips and interviews of who has used which soundstages and for which films or movies to the guests who are taking a backstage studio tour of the property. I think Mr. Crawford's presentation would have been more captivating and personal than the scenarios presented during the keynote.

My key takeaway was that the wireless capabilities that Aruba offers post acquision should have been highlighted more prominently at HPE Discover. I say this due to the large number of people who stood up and left during the Day One keynote when the topic of a mobile workforce became the topic of discussion. Many people seemed to miss the importance of the joint forces of Aruba and HP because they literally got up and walked out. It could be that all wireless offices haven't caught on yet in Europe (which I find hard to believe) or that the business use cases used during the keynote did not come across as compelling.

Full disclosure: HP/Aruba invited me to attend HPE Discover and paid for my airfare and hotel during my time in London for the HPE Discover event. I received gifts including an umbrella and jacket. The sponsorship of my travel or the gifts I received in no way influenced my opinion of the HPE Discover event.

HP E-Series Mobility Portfolio

HP has launched a new series of access points through a combined development effort with the HP/Colubris development teams.  The new access point model numbers are the E-MSM460, E-MSM466 and the E-MSM430.


HP's goal is to bring a 'single pane of glass' management capability to the wireless and wired networks through integrating the HP Mobility Manager 3.10 into the existing IMC solution. Mobility Manager can be a plugin to an existing PCM+ installation.


The biggest news to me was the AP MSM466, which is capable of concurrent radio operation in the 5GHz band.  This allows the access point to increase the channel capacity to double the supported client count in high density deployments.  This published statistics for this access point indicates a maximum performance of 450Mbps per radio. Using two 5GHz radios in an access point is interesting, but there are still a lot of 2.4GHz clients in use on most every WLAN.  Having all your clients in a specific area being only 802.lla devices may be a reality for some enterprise deployments, but I'd bet that most have a wireless client mix that can't be controlled or influenced by the IT department.


The HP mobility line can support different modes of operation - AP, Mesh and Monitor (packet capture) modes.   The new features of the HP mobility hardware producte line are standards based beamforming (explicit) and band steering. There was no mention of the ability to do spectrum analysis with any of the HP access point offerings. The lack of spectrum analysis as part of their product offering does not allow the HP mobility portfolio to identify sources of interference. The HP mobility product line can only adjust the power and channel of the access point in reaction to sources of interference.


I thought the slide showing the comparison of the HPMSM410 and HPEMSM460 to the Cisco AIR-LAP1142N-A-K9 access point was a little misleading.

Mostly since the TxR:S numbers for each of the access points are not clearly stated on this slide.  The Cisco 1142N access point is a 2x3:2, and the HP MSM410 is a 3x3:2 access point.


 I found it interesting that the MSM410 performed only slightly better than the 1142N even though the radio in the MSM410 has three transmit and three receive antennas.  The comparison difference is marked between the E-MSM460 and the Cisco 1142N due to the fact that the E-MSM460 is a 3x3:3 access point.  The metrics on this chart show the E-MSM460 providing 150Mbs of throughput at a distance of 230 feet from the access point. This works out to be one access point every 1400 feet.  If this distance is to be used as the gauge for the cell edge, that's a pretty dense access point deployment!


One thing I found of note was the ability of the access point to be changed into an autonomous access point just by changing the operating mode on the access point from the controller. You're not required to change the code running on the access point in order to make the access point function independent of the controller.


The HP mobility solution does not use the CAPWAP standards-based protocol for their controller based solution.  HP uses a proprietary wireless protocol that is based on IAPP and using OpenVPN with UDP tunnels in order to simplify network connectivity on LANs using NAT. 


This mobility announcement from HP will be great news for existing HP mobility customers, but I am doubtful that customers with an already deployed WLAN infrastructure will find enough compelling features to make the switch to the new HP E-MSM product line. However, some customers may require the cost benefit of the next day replacement that is part of the HP lifetime warranty.