Karunya University Uses Aruba Networks' adaptive Wi-Fi To Support

Digital Ink, electronic slide, and On-Line Exam initiatives

Centrally-Managed Wireless Network Spans 700-Acre Campus.

Aruba Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: ARUN), a global leader in wireless LANs and secure mobility solutions, today announced that Karunya University, ranked among the top ten private universities in India, is deploying Aruba’s User Centric Wi-Fi network across its 700-acre campus. The new system supports digital ink and electronic slide initiatives for classrooms and lecture halls, on-line exams, and campus-wide intranet and Internet access for students, staff, and faculty. The university’s legacy ‘Fat’ AP network was difficult to manage and could not be upgraded to provide the security and bandwidth required for the new electronic learning initiatives. Prior to selecting a replacement system, the university conducted a comprehensive technical assessment, including a demanding functional test, with Aruba and Motorola to assess stability, RF management capabilities, security, guest Internet access, ease of use, and cost effectiveness. Aruba was ranked first in all categories and subsequently selected for the project.

“Our legacy Wi-Fi network was a bottleneck that prevented us from making the best use of our 8.5km of optical fiber backbone, 32 Mbps Internet connectivity,” said S. Benson Edwin Raj, Karunya University’s Head-Computer Centre & Assistant Professor. “Karunya’s campus encompasses more than 700 acres and our autonomous access points didn’t provide adequate coverage, were a nightmare to manage, and lacked adequate security to protect them.  Aruba demonstrated that its wireless LAN delivered the coverage and security we required, was scalable to meet present and future needs, and was very simple to set-up and manage on an on-going basis.”

The university actively encourages the use of digital ink and electronic slides in classrooms and lecture halls to stimulate collaboration and participation. This demanding application requires reliable Wi-Fi connectivity in classrooms and lecture halls with large numbers of densely-deployed laptops. Similarly, the on-line exam system generates very large bursts of Wi-Fi traffic at the beginning and end of a class. The wireless LAN needs to sustain high-levels of traffic and reliably deliver all packets in a timely manner.

To deliver a best-in-class wireless experience, Aruba’s Adaptive Radio Management (ARM) software lowers deployment and maintenance costs by automating site surveys and using infrastructure-based controls to optimize the performance of Wi-Fi clients in real-time. Acting on their own, Wi-Fi clients do not always work cooperatively with other clients, or select the optimal band, channel, and access point. These issues are exacerbated in settings with densely packed users such as university class rooms, lecture halls and libraries. ARM uses a variety of techniques to control how Wi-Fi clients interact, thereby ensuring that data, voice, and video applications have sufficient network resources, including airtime, to operate properly.

Intranet and Internet security are provided by Aruba’s stateful, ICSA-certified policy-enforcement firewall.  The firewall is used to partition network access by strictly policing what resources users are allowed to access and how much bandwidth they consume. Classification criteria include user identity, device type, location, and time of day.  Guest and student access can be tightly controlled with respect to bandwidth consumed and available applications and resources.  “The firewall allows us to precisely tailor network access policies based on the specific user,” continued Raj.  “We use the firewall to manage the wireless network and deliver a very consistent user experience. Security policies are consistently enforced, regardless of where users roam or connect to the network.”

A free Farpoint Group white paper on ARM titled Advances In Wireless Infrastructure Control can be downloaded from Aruba’s Web site at www.arubanetworks.com/arm2.0.

About Aruba Networks
People move. Networks must follow. Aruba securely delivers networks to users, wherever they work or roam. Our mobility solutions enable the Follow-Me Enterprise that moves in lock-step with users:

• Adaptive 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi networks optimize themselves to ensure that users are always within reach of mission-critical information;
• Identity-based security assigns access policies to users, enforcing those policies whenever and wherever a network is accessed;
• Remote networking solutions ensure uninterrupted access to applications as users move;
• Multi-vendor network management provides a single point of control while managing both legacy and new wireless networks from Aruba and its competitors.

The cost, convenience, and security benefits of our secure mobility solutions are fundamentally changing how and where we work. Listed on the NASDAQ and Russell 2000 Index, Aruba is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has operations throughout the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Asia Pacific regions. To learn more, visit Aruba at http://www.arubanetworks.com. For real-time news about Aruba Networks follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ArubaNetworks.