Johannesburg, 23 Oct 2012
The bring your own device (BYOD) movement is sweeping the globe. The number of employees who are willing to pay for and bring their own devices to work in order to improve their efficiency and performance levels is growing beyond all expectations, says Martin May, regional director at Enterasys Networks.
This is driving a change in the design and management of today's wireless networks and related infrastructures to accommodate the content-rich offerings from an ever-growing list of new devices.
The fact is, the quality of the user experience associated with the latest BYOD devices has been central to their acceptance in the corporate environment where users now expect an anytime-anywhere wireless LAN connection for their WiFi devices. What's more, they expect this service to be at least equal to, if not better than, the service they receive from cellular network service providers.
In achieving these goals - and the ongoing acceptance by companies that have traditionally been wary of the devices due to security concerns - it's important that BOYD devices do not disrupt traditional workplace IT access requirements.
In the quest to achieve this objective, Apple has released Bonjour, an implementation of Zero Configuration Networking (Zeroconf), a group of technologies that includes service discovery, address assignment and host name resolution features.
Bonjour thus enables Apple iPads and iPhones to automatically discover each other without the need to enter IP addresses or configure DNS servers.
If Bonjour has an Achilles heel, it's that it generates excessive amounts of multicast data traffic when faced with large networks with many Apple clients and services. What's more, Bonjour traffic is sent only to local sub-networks or virtual local area networks (VLANs), and therefore it is not routable.
This means Bonjour devices linked to one VLAN cannot be used by client devices in another VLAN.
This is where Enterasys Networks steps in. Enterasys' new Bonjour Traffic Management solution addresses this awkward limitation and resolves the connectivity problems associated with it by applying the intelligence that's embedded in Enterasys switches and wireless network access points.
Importantly, it presents enterprise users who are looking for a way to leverage Bonjour in order to deploy Apple devices across large networks with a workable, cost-effective solution without disrupting entrenched network access policies and processes.
Built upon Enterasys' OneFabric architecture, its Bonjour Traffic Management solution works by providing centralised provisioning and distributed enforcement of role-based policies. In addition to Bonjour, it's able to address other multicast discovery services, such as Microsoft UPnP, allowing them to be routable across VLANs in large network environments.
The Enterasys solution achieves its objectives by dynamically creating a 'Bonjour' domain to contain Bonjour traffic based on user role, device and location. Rather than replicate traffic on all VLANs, as is common with conventional gateway solutions, Enterasys reduces the amount of multicast messages to only the devices that require the service.
In a complementary move, Enterasys is also helping to accelerate the adoption of connected Apple devices into the wireless (WiFi) IT landscape with Enterasys iFriendly, a solution that simplifies and reduces the operational expense of delivering wireless services to users.
An important objective of iFriendly is the reduction in the number of wireless networks - traditionally known as SSIDs (service set identifiers) - to a single campus SSID with role-based user access controls.
This technology, complementing Enterasys' Bonjour Traffic Management solution, simplifies traditional wireless network design while improving the 'on-boarding' experience for users connecting their Apple devices to the network. Enterasys-specific security controls ensure this is accomplished without compromising Apple's operating system (iOS) access security measures.
There are undoubtedly many opportunities ahead for the Enterasys/Apple association. Already, Enterasys' support for the Apple environment is helping to reduce complexity and has been proven to minimise service outages. It also removes a key obstacle often encountered by BYOD users - the irksome requirement to configure their apps for use on third-party wireless LANs.
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