Suresh Gopalakrishnan, vice president and general manager for emerging products at Extreme Networks, agrees that unified management tools for multivendor environments are scarce. "In general, this market is still in its infancy," he says.
Gopalakrishnan attributes this market immaturity to how networks were typically rolled out. "First, you deployed a wired network and figured out how to manage it. Then you added in wireless technology a few years later and figure out how to manage that," he says.
A big benefit of unified wired and wireless management is that organizations can apply common policies across an entire enterprise. Any changes made to access rights can be automatically updated among wired and wireless switches and access points. "If you have different tools for these tasks, the complexity of the network goes up and it quickly becomes a nightmare," he says.
Although Extreme offers unified network access controls for its switching and wireless products, the company uses a separate tool to handle RF management, a critical component of wireless networking.
Stop the madness!
Atkins says that the ad hoc nature of wireless rollouts has wreaked havoc on the ability to simplify management. "We've created this mess where we have a complete overlay network that is invisible to the underlying wired network. You're bypassing all the filtering, quality of service policies, and IDS/IPS monitoring you've put in place in your wired network because you have to tunnel traffic back to the wireless controller. And then to make matters worse, we have added security and/or location service overlays to the overlay wireless network. We have to stop this madness," he says.
According to Atkins, consolidation on the hardware side will alleviate some of this pain as wired and wireless networks become unified at the equipment level. "I don't think simply doing a common, but separate, management scheme is a good long-term approach. We need integration at the equipment level to make overall management smoother," he says.
Although they couldn't commit to a timeline, Atkins and Gopalakrishnan say they understand the urgency for unified wired and wireless management tools and note that their respective companies hope to have these tools on the market in the near future.