Wireless networking of today is different than it was just a few years ago. When one thinks about a wireless deployment, one often thinks of an access point like that which could be purchased at Best Buy or Circuit City. Those products can provide service for smaller deployments, like a home, but they lack enterprise management, security and service features. Modern wireless infrastructures, like Aruba's product, are overlays to an existing wired network. Access points are deployed to cover the air space at the edges of the network. Very little processing takes place on the access points. Rather, wireless traffic is ferried back to central Aruba wireless switches and interpreted there. Wireless communications, the management of security, firmware updates, service and radio tuning are managed by the switches for all of the access points, all at once. Once an access point is installed, there is likely no need to revisit it. Centralized management of all access points (APs) means that the infrastructure can tune radios to fill dead spots, or avoid interference. The APs can .hear. one another, and can coordinate in triangulation. For security, or for simply locating a missing wireless device, one can turn to the switch for location based capability. The Aruba controllers have a complete complement of security capabilities, include wireless intrusion prevention, stateful firewalls and high performance VPN termination. On the wireless side, the product can support a full range of encryption and authentication capabilities, including captive logon pages for guests, and network-authenticated access for known users. The Aruba product has both command line and graphical interfaces. The graphical interface provides visibility into Aruba's three dimensional monitoring and triangulation capability, as in the picture above. Aruba's wireless intrusion capability will allow for detection of rogue access points (unauthorized networks), impersonators, attackers and probers. It can automatically report and/or counter wireless attacks. A built-in firewall and role-based policy capability allows the administrator to assign different levels of access to different users based upon when, where and who they are.          More about what makes Aruba different

ArubaOS is a robust and sophisticated software suite that serves as the operating system and application engine for all Aruba mobility controllers. The advanced features and tight integration of ArubaOS meet the demanding requirements of mobile edge deployments. Standard with every Aruba mobility controller, ArubaOS provides unprecedented control over the entire wireless and mobile user environment with centralized wireless LAN switching and enterprise mobility management. The base feature set of ArubaOS includes sophisticated authentication and encryption, seamless mobility with fast roaming, RF management and analysis tools, centralized configuration and much more.

Add-on modules provide advanced capabilities such as wireless intrusion protection (WIP), policy enforcement and secure remote wireless access using IPsec. ArubaOS modules include Wireless Intrusion Protection, Policy Enforcement Firewall, VPN Server, Client Integrity, Remote AP, External Service Interface, Advanced AAA (authentication, authorization and accounting) and xSec Advanced L2 Encryption.

ArubaOS gives administrators a single point of control from which to locate and shut down rogue APs, identify and thwart malicious attacks and impersonations, load-balance traffic, detect coverage holes and interference and create stateful role-based security policies that follow users as they move. With ArubaOS, wireless and mobile environments can be easily secured, centrally managed and automatically optimized.

ArubaOS Optional Components