Motorola AirDefense - Infrastructure Management Solutions

WLAN MANAGEMENT MODULE: Centrally Manage Multi-Vendor Deployments

The Motorola AirDefense WLAN Management module provides administrators with a single, centralized console for muti-vendor deployments, simplifying management and providing consistent configuration across the network. This tool will enhance the visibility and control of wireless infrastructure for organizations with diverse WLAN deployments consisting of multiple vendors and equipment models.

Although heterogeneous environments are never ideal they are often impossible to avoid since organizations rarely have one type of vendor deployed system- wide. Even solutions from the same vendor could consist of different product versions offering a mixture of legacy and newer devices with non-uniform management interfaces, different firmware requirements, and varying architectures. Having multi-vendor wireless infrastructure deployed across a network complicates administration because multiple management platforms must be used which requires knowledge of different architectures, configuration settings, and syntax. Network administrators end up managing individual devices, rather than a holistic network. Organizations are often faced with frequent device mis-configurations, compliance problems, over extended IT staff, and exacerbated operational expense costs.

The WLAN Management module’s vendor and device agnostic user interface (UI) ensures consistency in configuration, compliance with policies, while reducing device and model specific expertise required by network administrators. It uses a plug-in architecture that abstracts vendor and device specific attributes from the end user, and allows the system to rapidly add new models without changing the UI or upgrading the system. The solution supports a variety of back-end management protocols to incorporate multiple vendor platforms and presents a normalized representation of statistics, configuration and faults to the administrator. Simply put, users can define network configuration profiles and effortlessly apply them to different portions of the network hierarchy, ultimately reducing the amount of administrative time required to manage the wireless LAN.

The WLAN Management module provides network administrators with:

• Advanced event and fault management from a centralized console, providing a uniform view into the network with security and network health/performance alerts
• Normalized faults, across multiple vendors for easy understanding and escalation; includes expert help to understand the impact on network and actions needed to remedy the issue
• Historical retention of wireless LAN infrastructure statistics and associations analysis for long term trending
• Comprehensive reporting with fully customizable reports
• Robust user interface to allow efficient location of the information needed to understand a problem and implement a solution
• Customizable dashboard allows focus on meaningful metrics, quickly identify any devices which are down and have generated faults
• Configuration compliance audit of the WLAN infrastructure and automatic correction of unsanctioned configuration changes
  
  

The AirDefense WLAN Management module eases the management of various infrastructure vendors, with multiple consoles, by providing IT staff with a centralized, holistic view into the network. With a simplified and unified console the solution is also a cost effective and manageable way to helps organizations migrate to new technology, while leveraging legacy infrastructure. The AirDefense WLAN Management module is operated from a dedicated AirDefense appliance and does not requires sensor deployment for functionality.

The AirDefense WLAN Management module runs on the Motorola AirDefense Services Platform (ADSP) and requires no additional hardware for functionality. The Motorola AirDefense Services Platform offers seamless integration of wireless Security & Compliance Solutions, multi-vendor WLAN Infrastructure Management, and Network Assurance tools that centrally troubleshoot user connectivity issues and fix WLAN performance problems. The AirDefense Services Platform is industry’s first comprehensive service oriented platform that can be leveraged by enterprise IT to dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) and achieve quicker ROI from their WLAN.

• Multi-Vendor Management
  Allows a centralized single console to control both Cisco and Motorola WLAN infrastructure
• Vendor & Architecture Agnostic UI Configuration
  Reduces the need for model and vendor specific knowledge necessary to make configuration changes
• Inheritance Based Configuration
  Enables management of the network rather than individual devices, employing changes becomes much simpler
• Simplified Staging And Provisioning
  Reduces staging and provisioning requirements for new deployments and additions or hardware changes to existing network

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