“I love it when a plan comes together.” One of my favorite lines from the 80′s TV series, The A-Team. That’s how I felt yesterday during the Echo conference that is being held this week at Watermark. When we designed our wireless infrastructure for our campus back in April of 2007, we had a plan to make it accessible to guests who step foot on our campus. We chose the Aruba Networks solution and currently have deployed an Aruba 6000 controller and forty eight access points across our nine story office tower and worship center.
Up until now we rarely have a large number of guests connected to the network at any one given time; usually fifteen to twenty folks connected in the coffee shop. Over the last two weeks however, with Leadership Summit and Echo, we’ve seen anywhere from one hundred to one hundred-fifty clients connected to the guest wifi. We think the number of concurrent clients could hit three hundred today.
What makes the Aruba so great is the ability to do this kind of thing very well. The controller has a stateful firewall, which makes it easy to control access to specific wireless lans without ever touching your switches or perimeter firewall. In addition, we are using bandwidth contracts on the controller to give our Echo network clients an eight megabit pipe to the Internet, ensuring that our staff still has seven meg available to them for day-to-day functions.
It’s a great feeling when you finally get to see the fruits of your labor come to harvest. I love it when a plan comes together.
