Outdoor WiFi is Smaller, Sleeker and Faster #HPE #Aruba #MFD3 #AP387

 Once upon a time, I found myself doing a lot of outdoor WiFi. Not the type of outdoor WiFi you hear people talking about now (stadiums or arenas), but college campuses, outdoor mesh and point to point links.

Recently at Mobility Field Day 3, I ran across this sweet little access point by Aruba. They call it the AP-387. I call it tiny, portable and FAST. It's their new flagship 802.11ac/ad outdoor access point.

They've designed it for maximum distances between APs of 300 meters (that's ~980 feet) and that is just about perfect for most outdoor bridge links. Notice, I said most. We all know of at least one or two bridge links that are pushing a mile long or more. This AP-387 has a 60GHz and a 5GHz radio built into this tiny, outdoor rated package and it is capable of multi-gigabit link speeds. Oh, and it can handle 'rain events' that might make a 5GHz link less than useable.

It has the ability to self-acquire a link by using the electronic scanning capabilities of the 60GHz antenna. It uses existing mounting hardware from the AP-270 (AP-270-MNT-H1/H2). If the link becomes disrupted or block, the radio can scan plus or minus 40 degrees horizontal and plus or minus 10 degrees vertical to re-establish the link. It can even re-engage the link through an RF bounce off of a flat smooth surface (should one exist) between the two ends of the link.


The narrow beam-width of the 60GHz radio lends itself to being co-located within 4-5 meters of another AP-387 using the same 60GHz channel. The AP will power on with the 60GHz radios backed off by 3dB if the AP is getting 802.3af power, which is way better than it not working at all unless it gets 802.3at power. You can see the full product demonstration in this Mobility Field Day 3 video and witness the graceful failover of the link from the 60GHz to the 5GHz radio without dropping the link. Skip to the 15 minute mark to see the link demo.

Aruba Powering Next Gen Mobility with Eric Johnson and Onno Harms from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

All of this is bringing me to this point. Doing outdoor mesh/point-to-point site surveys just got that much easier. The AP-387 weighs a fraction of the 17 pound (7.7 kilo) Cisco 1522 I used for my last outdoor survey (circa 2010).

I'll leave you with this video I made to document the insanity of me getting that 87 pound (40 kilo) site survey kit into the back of a Volvo 240 wagon once I'd completed the survey. Times have sure changed in what feels like a short eight years!

Mobility Field Day 3 Approacheth #MFD3

Mobility Field Day is coming sooon. September 12-14th I will gather with 11 other MFD delegates in San Jose to take part in Mobility Field Day 3! I haven't taken part in a full length Tech Field Day event since Wireless Field Day 8 (and that was a long, long time ago!). A lot has changed since then and I'm looking forward to hearing the latest news from the participating sponsors: Arista, Aruba, Cisco, Fortinet, Mist, Netscout and Nyansa.

NetBrain Blew My Mind! #TFDx #CLUS

Many moons ago I was a Network Administrator who managed static IP addresses by consulting the critical IP Networks Excel Spreadsheet. I had to find a free Windows based app which would show me a diff view of two switch configurations during the 15 day trial window. I had to create network diagrams in Visio which never included the information I needed when I was troubleshooting an issue with the very same network which I had previously drawn. I remember the Senior Network Administrator being very leery of software monitoring solutions which monitored by polling the network devices. At the time, I imagined that any additional load on our network devices would cause the whole network to suffer under the load of  any additional monitoring traffic.

This brings me to the software demonstration I witnessed last week. The CEO and founder of NetBrain described the very same way of working which I had lived (albeit thirteen years ago). He then went onto have Ben Abbot (Pre-Sales Engineer) perform a demonstration of their current software product: NetBrain Enterprise Edition.

With my very own eyes, I saw things that I did not know were possible. I saw network diagrams created on demand to show the information necessary to troubleshoot any given network issue. I saw network documentation automated and annotated by multiple network administrators. I saw Qapps written to solve immediate troubleshooting issues by someone who was not a programmer and did not have a programming/scripting/coding background.

I kept my amazement to myself. It had been so long since I had been in charge of a network, surely all of these things were now possible with any number of software solutions. The room stayed quiet. I could not tell if others were as impressed as I, or if they were thinking "Yep, business as usual."

As it turns out, everyone in the room was just as impressed as I was. Maybe they were all shocked into silence in the same way that I was. After all, the NetBrain application they showed us has been 10 years in the making and has 5 million lines of C++ code to make performing complicated tasks seem that simple.

At CiscoLive 2015, NetBrain released their first free DevOps Edition of the NetBrain software. The limit to the free software is that it can only map up to 10 devices. 

As it stands now, Network Engineers are being forced to learn REST API scripting (among others) to do SDN troubleshooting. This free version of software is designed to ease the transition for the Network Administrator to manage the network here and now.

Aruba, HP, MobileIron, PaloAlto, Arista Networks, what do they all have in common?

As you probably know by now, HP and Aruba have announced their intent to merge into a single corporation. Call it an acquisition, call it a sale, call it a merger, call it whatever you like. This week at Aruba Atmosphere 2015, the keynote presentations made it clear that Aruba and HP are all about partnering with other companies to bring the customer the best-of-breed solution set.

The keynote presentation by Dominic Orr gave us the clear message that things were not going to change. Meg Whitman spoke to us live from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with a full six second delay between Dominic speaking and Meg reacting. The jury is out on whether or not this was actually a live feed, but the comedic effect of the delay was milked for all it was worth.

I found it very interesting to see Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron come on stage after Meg Whitman. I'm wondering if we might see another acquisition by HP, simply based on the focus Aruba is putting on strategic partnerships with companies who help Aruba/HP bring differentiated offerings to market. The lack of a built in MDM solution has been a glaring hole in the Cisco product portfolio for a very long time. Sure, Cisco has partnered with at least 6 different MDM vendors, but since they're only parters - your mile will vary greatly when you're seeing support to implement any give solution.

Chad Kinzelberg, Senior VP Palo Alto Networks went on to describe how the Palo Alto firewalls were much more nimble because they don't rely on the port based communication firewall sets like legacy firewalls do (read: Cisco).

Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista Networks rounded out the speaker list. She is by far the best public speaker I've heard present in a very long time. It was clear she had given this messaging about Arista many, many times - but she still managed to sound human doing it.

It will be interesting to see how the merger between HP and Aruba plays out over time, especially when there are so many companies relying on Aruba hardware to have a mobility offering in the first place.

Also, the opening act before Dominic took the stage was really cool! The iLuminate dance team from America's Got Talent kicked off the Atmosphere conference in a unique, geeky, Tron-esque fashion! Whoever booked them for this event deserves a pat on the back! Good work!

Would you be interested in a Wireless Tech Field Day?

The question has been asked: Is there enough demand to support a Wireless Tech Field Day?


I know I can count at least 15 ~ 19 wireless people on Twitter that might like to participate as  delegates, and at least 27 or so companies that could participate as event sponsors..


So, I'm throwing this survey out there to find out what companies you'd be interested in meeting with and to see how many interested parties actually fill out the survey!  Once we can identify the demand, it may make it easier to find event sponsors.


http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GKM2W6Q

Tech Field Day - wrap up

Last week I took part in a unique meeting of the minds - now I freely admit that I didn't get everything that was discussed, but neither did @plankers.  He was (and is) The Lone Sysadmin, and I was the only wireless person in attendance.  I did learn a lot, and took a lot of notes.  It seems to me that large companies have a hard time dialing back the sales pitch, or the back story of how they came to be.  I think they just can't help it - I think this gets written into their source code once they've been assimilated into the corporation.


The event was called Tech Field Day, organized by Gestalt IT (Stephen Foskett & Claire Chaplais).  This was the first networking focused Tech Field Day, and the list of vendors that presented to our group was: HP, SolarWinds, Cradlepoint, Force10 - for the second day: Juniper, Arista Networks, Xsigo.


HP delved into the future of network virtualization with Jay Mellman Sr. Director WW Marketing, then had  Les Stuart talk about the HP Intelligent Management Center, but I'll just provide a link to Jeremy Gaddis' blog post which covers the event in much greater detail.  The recurring theme of the switching vendors was that nobody had a supported switch emulator for testing proof of concepts for change management needs - HP currently does not have a solution to enable the Network Admin to prove to the rest of enterprise that a planned configuration change would not take out the network..


SolarWinds crew was pleased to hear that they were free to dive into the nuts and bolts since we were all fully aware of the basics of how their software worked.  I was not aware that SolarWinds can monitor/manage multiple vendors' wireless devices out of the box.


Cradlepoint's offering of 3G and 4G wireless hotspot devices was very interesting.  Their new pre-paid 4G wireless device called the Rover, and was shaped like the thing you're handed when you have to wait for a table at Macaroni Grill.

I can see the beauty of the pre-paid feature, but man are these things gonna cause problems if they become prolific.  I say cause problems, because just imagine a dozen people firing up their Rover to surf the net at the same time. Each one may have its own 4G uplink, but the local hostpot is still 802.11B/G, and there are still only three channels that are non-overlapping.  I looked through the Rover FAQ, but didn't see anything indicating you can change the 802.11 operating channel, or how you'd even know there was interference.  There are strong business drivers for this type of localized wi-fi hotspot capability since not everywhere has free wifi (yet).  I can see this type of networking device with cellular backhaul, local 802.11 wireless connectivity being used at events like Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza or other outdoor events with sales tents where hard wiring the tents isn't feasible.  Their product comparison sheet shows which devices have ethernet ports, and which ones support 802.11n.  Now WPA2 with a random string of 63 characters for the PSK doesn't meet PCI compliance unless you throw a firewall in there, but that probably wouldn't stop a small independent merchant from using something like this at a mobile event.


Force10 - Company started in 1999 to build around emerging standard of 10 gig ethernet.  In 2002, they first shipped a 1/2 rack with 28 10GB (line rate fully non blocking) ports.  Today they ship 1/2 rack systems with 140 10GB LR ports.  Their technology is used by the majority of the large portals based in Silicon Valley.  Also of note, Force10 is powers 2 of the 10 fastest systems in the world.


Juniper - The general overview of how Juniper started was useful to me, since I only know about their switching products from the Juniper as a Second Language online course that I've never gotten around to studying.  We got into the real meat and potatoes of Juniper when Dan Backman sat down with us for the Round Table discussion.  Dan is ridiculously smart, and has been hip-deep in Juniper for many, many years.  Until the video of the roundtable is up, I found a 2006 Interop podcast where you can see what I mean..  I'm looking forward to learning Juniper once I've passed the CCIE wireless.  Make a note to yourself to tune back in once all the Tech Field Day videos are up on Vimeo - the Juniper Round Table should not be missed.  The unsupported Juniper emulator - Olive  is JUNOS software running on an PC rather than a Juniper router.  They would not say if they were working on a supported switch emulator, and deferred the conversation to be discussed at a later date.  There are a million online how-to guides for installing Olive/JUNOS, hopefully Juniper got the message from us that a supported implementation is greatly desirable.


Arista Networks - I had not put two and two together to associate @dgourlay with the Packet Pushers Runt Podcast Arista Networks and Data Centre Switching.  I wish I'd listened to the podcast before this preso. In any case, my takeaway from Arista is that their gear is installed in places where you absolutely cannot lose a packet, or accept a delayed packet.  Think high-frequency trading, biomedical research, cloud networking. From what I understood, their OS is basically a linux kernel, with a few modifications to offset the different traffic flows from the main switching functions - and basically anything you'd do with bash/perl/python is possible at the CLI of an Arista switch.  Now, I'm no coder, and I'm sure that when Jeremy G. or Ivan P. writes up a synopsis of Arista it'll be a comprehensive overview.  I did get that "If you can code it, it can happen" is a very powerful statement to make to people with a deep understanding of Unix/Linux/BSD etc..  Arista commented that if you wanted to run their code on any pc/laptop etc to test configuration designs or proof of concepts you can, with the vEOS download.


Xsigo - This is the preso where @plankers got excited, because Xsigo was speaking his language.  Bob was able to explain a few things from the server side perspective when questions came up from the networking side of the table.  The jist of Xsigo is they provide a virtual I/O that connects to servers via standard Ethernet server ports -- no add-on cards needed.  I thought of their solution as a patch bay of sorts between the server front end and the backend hardware.  The configuration was all done through a java based web interface, and it was pretty simple to set up.  We spent about 10 minutes setting up a couple of servers to a cloud in their lab/classroom.  Things have changed a lot since I was unboxing HP fans to build DL380s in 2004.


All in all, the Tech Field Day was a unique opportunity to visit so many organizations in person - and have in depth technical conversations about their products (once you beat the marketing out of them).  My next goal is to reach out to the contacts I have at wireless vendors to see if we can't set up a wireless-specific Tech Field Day sometime soon. Are you listening vendors? We want to ask you tough questions, and talk with the people that have the direct answers.


Naturally, I took a lot of pictures - not nearly as many as Stephen, but nothing beats the Polaroid I took of him.  period.

My Tech Field Day Picasa Slideshow:





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Full disclosure - the Tech Field Day event was made possible by contributions from the sponsors, and I did not incur any travel or lodging costs.  The schwag I went home with was a t-shirt from Solarwinds, a 4gb usb key from Juniper and HP and a Cradlepoint MBR900 except I forgot the MBR900 at Juniper - so Abner is shipping it to me :)

Photos from Tech Field Day

I've uploaded photos of this weeks' events to Picasa.  I'll scan in the Polaroids in all their glory at a later date.  The Polaroids will be uploaded to bit.ly/MyPolaroids.  I've also uploaded the lot to Flickr so they can be part of the Tech Field Day Flickr pool.

CradlePoint 3G/4G product offerings

CradlePoint has teamed with Clearwire to develop the rover 4G prepaid hotspot device (puck shaped) to work over Clearwire's 4G WiMAX network.  CradlePoint devices have the ability to do a firmware upgrade to take advantage of the 4G network speeds.

Their CBA 750 (cellular bridging adapter) has 2.4ghz built in N radio along side the 2.5ghz WiMAX radio - it is a plug and play device that can provide a failover option for small businesses with unreliable DSL or Cable internet connections. The RF in the CradlePoint devices are typically 30 dBm 'quieter' than FCC rules require.

WiPipe -> built on a NetBSD product platform, with support for 150+ modems & cellular networks.  There may be future plans to build a function to allow the cellular network connection allow you an OOB connection to the networking devices' console port.

HP working with Shell to sense the Earth's vital signs

Links to HP's wireless offerings
HP Wireless Offerings
HP Standalone Access Points
HP Coordinated Access Points (controller based)
HP Wireless Controllers

Not sure how I missed this news article about HP working with Shell to develop a million node wireless network to scan the earth to ensure that Shell's oil drilling is more successful. There is another article describing the Cense project (Central Nervous System for the Earth).  The future of tracking devices that can also operate as sensors (light/movement/pressure/temperature) that are also the size of a shirt pin is pretty amazing.  To think of all of the ways that tiny devices like these will be able to collect information, and possibly communicate information back into the equipment they're attached to will be pretty cool.  A

HP has partnered with AeroScout, AirTight and ekahau to provide location tracking and wireless security - may be carrying these products on their price list in future.  The goal is to provide solutions instead of just hardware.

-----------------other notes from today's session------------------------

Speaker - Jay Mellman Sr. Director WW Marketing

HP Networking future

The goal is to wire once, virtualize the connectivity & put management in place to mimic normal connectivity "feel" to server/network support.

.."Networking is a critical pillar to make a converged infrastructure combining storage, servers, power & cooling as well as management software."

Due to LAN challenges, date center changes, IT requirements and security issues - converged networks allow the ability to identify and diagnose issues that affect any aspect of the infrastructure.  Application layer vulnerabilities (ex. PDF security issues) lead into the need for converged networking in order to see into all levels of the network.

The history of networking started with simply connect devices, then the direction moved to consolidate single nodes and extend resources to end users.  The future will demand service delivery.  HP is leading a standards-based open approach to service delivery.

Simpler and Secure Infrastructure

Sys Admins

was physical build out of server hardware/loading OS

now creating a server is right click, clone..

Net Admin

is/was manual record keeping of IP addresses/vlans/passwords

Agile Service Delivery

HP's goal is to decrease the time to service for network adds/changes.

Proven Business value

Customers benefit when they have more choices.

Gestalt IT's Net Field Day - 4 days & counting

So the trip to SJC for the Gestalt IT's Net Field Day is really happening next week.  I've read through the final list of companies that will be presenting - and I can tell by the list that I'll be learning a lot.  I haven't been surrounded by data center/route/switch/security people since I worked at UO.  That was a long time ago..  Working at CTI doesn't really count since I didn't have the time to learn much from my other super-smart co-workers.  I spent all my time learning from and working with the great mobility practice people.

I'll be taking lots of notes on everything and posting them right here.

I'm bringing the flip, my Polaroid Spectra, and a lot of film. I'm pretty confident there hasn't been an analogue element to any of the prior #TechFieldDay events, and I'm happy to put an old twist on new events. bit.ly/MyPolaroids