With its awareness of user identities, the Mobility Exchange is the industry’s most advanced WLAN device. The Mobility System Software keeps both the Mobility Exchanges and the Mobility Points informed about user data paths, ACLs and services, which are essential to seamless integration and secure mobility.

Since they share an integrated control and data plane, Mobility Exchanges and Mobility Points can scale enterprisewide. Intelligence is concentrated in Mobility Exchanges, which are secured in wiring closets, while Mobility Points are mounted on ceilings and walls. In fact, the Mobility Point can’t take any action unless the Mobility Exchange tells it to.

While the industry debates thin vs. fat APs, the Mobility Point is best described as “fit.” It’s a secure radio with enough processing power to tackle tasks typically performed near users, like encrypting messages and collecting statistics. But Mobility Points don’t have a console port, command-line interface (CLI) or local store of user names and passwords. They automatically download configuration data from the Mobility Exchange; if one is stolen or hacked, it presents no threat. Mobility Points can be purchased with one radio that’s software-selectable for 802.11a or 802.11b or with dual radios that support both 802.11a and 802.11b. When 802.11g is ratified, it will be supported. The Mobility Point has two 10/100 Mbps PoE ports to ensure a redundant data path and transparent failover.

Redundancy and Resiliency
WLAN fault tolerance is critical: A 20-port Mobility Exchange can easily serve 200 users. Trapeze’s answer: redundant load-sharing power supplies, redundant load-sharing gigabit uplinks and redundant Mobility Point connections for dual-homing. It also implements redundant protocols like Spanning Tree, Per VLAN Spanning Tree (PVST+) and even Cisco’s proprietary port fast.

How an enterprise WLAN handles IEEE 802.1X authentication is another key issue. Handling everything on a central authentication server is almost begging for a bottleneck, forcing IT to buy and manage more devices. Trapeze’s Mobility Exchange offloads the central server by handling EAP processing, session consolidation, encryption, key management and certificate and key generation locally.

Taming the Wireless Tigers
Trapeze Networks delivers an integrated Mobility System built for today’s enterprise. The Trapeze Mobility System takes the pain out of planning, deploying and managing WLANs. It seamlessly integrates wired and wireless, without requiring reconfiguration. And it implements secure mobility. With its innovative Identity-Based Networking, users log in once and roam effortlessly, while IT is guaranteed that user permissions and attributes travel with the user, whether wired or wireless. Finally, IT managers can build one network that serves all users. Trapeze is wireless done right.

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