UPDATED 12:09 EDT / AUGUST 23 2017

INFRA

Riverbed gets edgy as Xirrus acquisition meshes Wi-Fi with SD-WAN

Shortly after its founding in 2004, wireless network provider Xirrus Inc. saw that Wi-Fi use and demand were growing faster than the infrastructure to support it. It began developing technology to scale, provision and orchestrate Wi-Fi for large numbers of users. The company recently met its match in Riverbed Technology Inc., which saw Xirrus’ Local Area Network tech as the missing piece to its Software-Defined Wide Area Network products. Riverbed acquired Xirrus last April for an undisclosed sum.

The merged companies are now working to run SD-WAN and LAN holistically with management through a single control pane, according to Bruce Miller, vice president of product marketing at Xirrus. “The synergies are very much there in terms of providing that vision across the entire network,” Miller told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.) 

Riverbed will continue to offer Xirrus as a discrete enterprise Wireless Local Area Network product. However, the acquisition is not just a tack-on, but a full integration, creating unique capabilities, Miller pointed out. Xirrus is assimilating deeply into Riverbed’s SteelConnect application-defined SD-WAN solution. It will “support the Software Defined LAN, so to speak, at the edge of the network with switches and Wi-Fi access points,” Miller added.

Bringing the whole network alphabet — SD-WAN, LAN, WAN and WLAN — into conjunction, Riverbed and Xirrus then organize the lot through common policies. These policies may extend to applications or Internet of Things edge points, which are managed through the cloud.

Scaling out Wi-Fi and enabling it for IoT edge devices is a point of common interest for Riverbed and Xirrus. “Wi-Fi’s a utility. You need to make it utility-grade; you need to make it enterprise-grade so it can scale and support those things,” Miller said.

Scaling out Wi-Fi for tens of thousands of users is especially challenging, according to Miller. Xirrus has worked to develop technologies that make this possible for its customers. Its Wi-Fi network is now deployed in large stadiums and on university campuses. The Liverpool Football Club is a Xirrus customer, as are Columbus State University in Georgia and Microsoft Corp.

Cloud management easy buttons

The policies and tools that simplify Wi-Fi orchestration are now criss-crossing with SteelConnect SD-WAN.

The Xirrus Control Center is a dashboard that manages network provisioning. Users can view multiple tenants — be they customers or locations — via a cloud management system. EasyPass allows Xirrus end users to access Wi-Fi via social or email login without having to remember a password. “Everybody knows how to log into their Facebook or Google account, so now let’s just make that part of the Wi-Fi experience,” Miller said.

Similarly, integrations with Microsoft Azure and Google clouds let users skip a step and access Wi-Fi instantly with Office 365 or Google Apps credentials.

A policy engine that recognizes 1,600 apps allows organizations using Xirrus’ Wi-Fi to prioritize network availability for each. They could set their enterprise resource planning as high priority and, say, Tinder as low priority.

Wi-Fi eye for big data analytics

On top of these features, big data analytics are now possible thanks to all of the data visible to Wi-Fi networks.

“We know who’s on the network. We know what they’re doing, what applications they’re going to. We know where they are, because we actually calculate the location,” Miller said.

Xirrus can also tell how many users of a Wi-Fi network are new or repeat. “… A retail customer might be interested in that,” Miller said. “I can take all that data — on who, what, where, why — that they’re doing and then turn that into business intelligence.”

To watch the complete video interview, visit the event page (registration required). (* Disclosure: Riverbed Technology Inc. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Riverbed Technology nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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