“Meru’s approach to augmenting the programmability and flexibility of wireless networks embraces the spirit and goals of the open networking community and the transition to SDN-enabled networks,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president, network infrastructure, IDC. “By fully supporting open, standards-based management and control all the way to the access point, Meru intends to provide support for SDN with an eye to meeting the needs of enterprise IT and network managers.”
Existing unified access management platforms are costly and closed, typically providing visibility and control of LAN switching as well as WLAN controllers and access points only when the entire solution is supplied by a single vendor. By taking the information exposed by application vendors’ SDN APIs and using it to their own advantage – optimising performance of those applications without enabling management of both their controllers and access points – these vendors’ SDN implementations are incomplete.
Meru’s SDN-enabled Wi-Fi solutions will help ensure consistently high performance of critical business applications and simplify unified management of wired and wireless networks, giving customers immediate benefits without additional training or a 'rip-and-replace' of their existing controllers and access points.
“SDN enables application performance, ease of management and simplicity of use for the unified wired and wireless access network,” said Ajay Malik, senior vice president of engineering and quality assurance at Meru. “Meru is working toward truly open, standards-based networks where best-in-class solutions win, removing complexity from access network deployment and management – without requiring additional training and equipment replacement.”