Over the past several years the lines of demarcation have become blurred in terms of the wired and wireless network. What this simply means in my opinion is a L2/L3 switch is a switch, a controller is a controller and an AP is an AP.
I came up through the earlier stages of WiFI,as started I working for Symbol in 1999 (now Motorola). Cisco Systems, Inc. Aruba Networks, and Juniper would not be great companies in the marketplace if they did not have good gear, support, and active R&D. So then what makes one look outside of the box..at least in the healthcare vertical? The majority of healthcare IT $$ are being spent to gear up for the mobilization toward the Electronic Medical Record and “meaningful use”. So this means when looking at infrastructure…it may not be status as usual..but taking a hard look at CAPEX, OPEX, and TCO…oh lest we forget IEC 80001. Juniper excels in the motto of “keep it simple stupid”..while saving a lot of costs and reducing risk. Just for instance let the intelligence behind the cape..do the job. In the review of Juniper it seems that they tackle this head on…big time. Imagine having a “virtual cloud network..one where the Master Controller is the brains in the enterprise to handle all IP addressing, firmware/software upgrades all the way down to the AP..WITHOUT disrupting real-time applications. Nirvana for the healthcare CIO. Juniper redundant controllers can be “hot swappable”, without spending a lot of time and money re-configuring your network…let alone worrying about downtime. This saves a lot of OPEX costs..let alone reducing service costs..major league. Finally license costs are based on the controller not AP counts, thus reducing license cost by 1/2 versus the traditional pricing model. It seems that one market leader has an interesting marketing web site to deal with Juniper…I find this funny as all get out.
http://www.overpromisesunderdelivers.net
