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Pender County Schools Quickly and Easily Deploys Aerohive's Controller-less WLAN Solution
Reliable, Scalable, Cost-effective and Easy to Manage Cooperative Control WLAN Solution from Aerohive to Support District's World-class Technology Learning Goals
SUNNYVALE, Calif., September 13, 2010 — Aerohive Networks, creators of the award-winning cooperative control wireless LAN (WLAN) architecture, announced today that Pender County Schools of North Carolina has deployed Aerohive's innovative WLAN solution. The district selected Aerohive for its superior level of manageability, performance and resiliency at total solution cost well below the competitive products it evaluated. Nestled within a diverse set of suburban and rural communities in North Carolina, the district's seven elementary schools, five middle schools, three high schools, and an early college high school educate more than 8,400 students every year.
With a focus on building upon its world-class faculty, schools, and technology, Pender County Schools strives to provide innovative and creative learning opportunities that motivate students to succeed in today's increasingly competitive world. A crucial part of that educational experience is the technology and educational applications it provides its students. As it looked to support a full range of new demanding applications the school wanted to use, officials chose to replace its 802.11abg network with an 802.11n network. Beyond the performance gains, the network also would have to be reliable, scalable, cost-effective and easy to manage.
After an exhaustive search and market research, Landon Scism, CTO at Pender County Schools chose to evaluate two WLAN products. The first WLAN they deployed proved unable to meet any of the criteria they set. The controller-based equipment, from a well-known manufacturer, not only was costly and difficult to set up, it also kept breaking down. "We had serious issues with the Access Points (APs). They required a specialist to set them up and to keep them running," Scism says. "We were not about to deploy that equipment throughout the district."
When evaluating Aerohive's cooperative control WLAN architecture, Scism pushed the solution hard. He chose a pilot site at one of the district's middle schools that is a heavy user of mobile devices and graphics-heavy educational games. At the time of the trial, roughly 300 iPhones and 250 Netbooks were in place. "We pushed the Aerohive wireless LAN as much as we could," recalls Scism. "We pushed it with traffic that would have crashed the trial network from the other vendor. We didn't have any problems at all. Aerohive handled everything we threw at it."
And, for the next few months, Scism kept pushing the Aerohive network hard. "We were very impressed with how easy it was to set up and manage, as well as its performance," he adds. "Also key for us was the fact that it didn't require a technical specialist to install and manage the Aerohive devices." After its thorough and lengthy evaluation, Pender County decided to standardize its wireless LAN deployment with Aerohive.
Obtaining that level of performance and resiliency with the competing WLAN architecture would have been much more costly, as we would have had to install multiple hardware controllers throughout the district. Fortunately, one Aerohive access point is all that is required to handle all of the traffic required by two classrooms. "Aerohive has been so much more cost-effective that we can afford to finish our WLAN objectives by the end of this year," he says.
Those objectives include bringing wireless access to the remaining schools in the district. "When we trialed the other wireless LAN, it was just a constant battle to keep up and running," Scism says. Thankfully, the Aerohive architecture provided all of the performance, resiliency, and security needed. "It has worked just wonderfully."
Aerohive's Cooperative Control technology combines an enterprise-class access point, known as a HiveAP, with a suite of cooperative control protocols and functions that bring all of the benefits of controller-based architectures but without the cost and complexity of traditional controllers or overlay networks. This design makes it possible for multiple HiveAPs to self-organize into groups, called "hives," that share control information between HiveAPs to provide functions such as fast layer 2/layer 3 roaming, cooperative RF management, as well as security and mesh networking. In addition, unlike controller-based networks that create a single point of failure, HiveAPs work together to recover from hardware and system failures without requiring redundant systems.
To read the full Pender County Schools case study, please visit http://www.aerohive.com/resources/pender-county-school-district.
For more information on Aerohive's HIveAP and HiveManager, please visit http://aerohive.com/products.
About Pender County Schools
Pender County Schools are among the fastest growing school districts, by rate, in the state of North Carolina. Though the district is classified as low wealth and high poverty, students continually exceed local and state performance on North Carolina End of Grade and End of Course tests.
About Aerohive Networks
Aerohive unleashes the potential of enterprise Wi-Fi, enabling customers to stop buying copper, to move applications to the air, and to maximize workforce productivity. The company's award-winning cooperative architecture eliminates costly controllers, saving money and providing unprecedented resiliency, up to 10X better application performance, and an opportunity to start small and expand without limitations. Aerohive was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. The company's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Northern Light Venture Capital. For more information, please visit www.aerohive.com or call 408-510-6100.
