- Wireless Fidelity Achieved
- Aerohive Networks
Networks are living creatures, ever-growing, ever-changing, and Wi-Fi networks change even more quickly and in more ways than wired networks. New APs are deployed, neighboring networks pop up, clients roam, data rates change, flash crowds converge on one part of the network. Users love the freedom and mobility, but they also are demanding that IT consistently deliver them predictable performance in spite of the dynamic nature of the network. Wi-Fi networks are getting faster and smarter and that helps. But Wi-Fi administrators are still hampered by having minimal visibility into how well they are actually delivering what their users expect. They don't have visibility into the actual performance level being provided to the Wi-Fi clients by the infrastructure and their infrastructure only has limited ability to dynamically adjust to deliver the experience their users are demanding. Today's Wi-Fi administrators can only hope their clients are getting the planned level of performance - and that isn't good enough.
Before Wi-Fi protocol analyzers, administrators and consultants alike were only able to troubleshoot by continually reviewing the network design of and device operation within the network infrastructure. Gathering meaningful performance statistics and performing trouble analysis and repair was difficult, if not impossible. With the introduction of Wi-Fi protocol analyzers, these professionals had the equivalent of RF goggles. They could now see what was happening and could reactively troubleshoot problems. The problem with this approach is a lack of ability to properly diagnose and repair performance problems in near real-time. With this in mind, Aerohive has introduced the next level in network visibility and reactive response. Aerohive's new infrastructure-side performance monitoring and response system, dubbed SLA Compliance, increases the troubleshooting granularity and active response speed far beyond what any IT professional could accomplish manually and paves the way for IT to move towards actual performance guarantees.
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Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have been a staple of the WAN menu for a couple of decades. These began primarily as a method for service providers to "guarantee" a certain set of expectations for their customers.
Of course, many, if not most, IT shops act as a service provider to their customers. Consequently, it became common throughout the 1990s for the IT department to offer SLAs to their internal customers. This ensured that the internal customers were getting the services for which they "paid," whether the "payment" was direct or indirect.
Now that Wi-Fi is an integral part of the corporate network, it's only natural that certain levels of service can be expected by the users within the network.
This document does a great job of exploring the options and parameters for internal SLAs for Wi-Fi services.