Solutions > Applications > Migration from Legacy Autonomous APs

Migration from Legacy Autonomous APs

The first wave of wireless LANs saw autonomous access points being deployed in key verticals such as healthcare, retail, and manufacturing where there was overwhelming business advantage to giving users and devices wireless access to the network. Subsequent deployments saw autonomous APs being used for convenience guest and meeting room access across a broad range of industries. Now many organizations that bought autonomous APs in the past are looking to upgrade their wireless network to allow for fast roaming, to remove the security problems with their old WEP-only APs, or because their vendor has stopped feature development on their installed autonomous APs.

As the IT organization looks at their choices for upgrading these older autonomous AP wireless LANs they are finding that the controller-based architecture has some significant challenges with providing a clean upgrade from their existing solution. The upgrade is challenging because they have already architected their network around autonomous APs that directly forwards traffic to the LAN, rather than around an overlay network that backhauls all traffic. In addition, most controller-based solutions will cost 2 times to 4 times the cost of their original autonomous AP deployment, especially when the environment is mission critical and the need for redundant controllers is factored into the equation, or if the company is unsure about their future requirements for more APs so they are forced to over-buy controller capacity.

In contrast, Aerohive Networks cooperative control architecture provides a plug and play upgrade for these existing autonomous AP networks. By simply swapping out the old APs and replacing them with HiveAPs, with no changes to the network architecture, IP addressing, or VLANs, the wireless LAN is able to support the fast roaming, security, dynamic RF management, wireless mesh redundancy, and the stateful failover and rerouting that modern wireless networks require. The cooperative control architecture provides this clean upgrade path to these next generation capabilities without requiring controllers at each location, which means it is a substantially lower cost deployment and as requirements evolve, capacity can be added linearly, when it is needed, without having to worry about costly controller upgrades.

Return to Solutions Applications >>