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Meru's E(z)RF Network Manager now available from Wavelink

Announcement posted by Wavelink 24 Jul 2009

Bringing event-based forensics to wireless LANs to speed up troubleshooting and reduce user downtime

Melbourne, June 29, 2009 – Wavelink Communications, a value added distributor of business IP telephony and wireless solutions, has announced the immediate availability of Meru Networks’ E(z)RF Network Manager 2.0.

E(z) RF Network Manager 2.0 is the first wireless LAN management system to record every client-network wireless protocol interaction, rather than merely gather aggregate statistics.

With knowledge of every past RF event, the system lets network managers ‘rewind’ the WLAN, recreating past event sequences to quickly pinpoint the causes of client problems.

The system also automatically correlates all recorded events to make highly accurate inferences about problems that have not yet been reported.

Jonathan Ordman, director, Wavelink said, “Meru Networks’ event-based approach to WLAN diagnostics makes it easier and faster for help-desk personnel to do after-the-fact troubleshooting.

“Usually by the time the help desk can respond to a problem, the dynamic RF environment has changed and evidence of the problem's cause has disappeared. E(z)RF Network Manager 2.0 lets you ‘rewind’ time to the relevant series of events and view the RF state, which dramatically shortens the time needed for troubleshooting.”

Highly scalable to accommodate growing enterprise requirements, E(z)RF Network Manager 2.0 enables management of up to 25,000 access points (APs)and hundreds of controllers across multiple geographic regions.

From a single console, users can rapidly drill down and view activity details at each level of the infrastructure – controllers, (APs) and individual wireless client devices.

Meru's E(z)RF Network Manager 2.0 represents a fundamentally new approach to WLAN management, using continuous event recording, data mining and a knowledge-based inference engine to reduce troubleshooting time – and user downtime – from days to minutes.

Forensic troubleshooting – turning back the clock on network problems
Most WLAN management systems periodically poll the network and report on statistics such as throughput, packet loss and signal strength. The simplistic statistics-based approach provides no information on the causes of network problems – and thus no basis for correcting them.

Network managers must manually correlate information to look for potential causes, a lengthy and tedious process that can affect user productivity for long periods of time.

Meru's E(z)RF Network Manager 2.0 continuously monitors the state of every client and the wireless infrastructure, capturing and storing all key over-the-air events and client state transitions, to greatly simplify the job of managing wireless LANs.

E(z)RF Network Manager 2.0 records every state change a client undergoes, including connection, authentication, station handoff, DHCP events and IP address discovery, and stores that information for later mining.

By capturing client-network interactions in the order in which they occurred – rather than just periodic or aggregated statistics – the system maintains all crucial client information that can be used to help recreate the historical state of the network at any instant in time.

A proactive knowledge-based inference engine automatically correlates information across all recorded events and generates inferences about potential client and infrastructure issues, enabling proactive identification of those issues – often before they are reported. The inference engine can currently identify more than 100 relevant event patterns indicating possible problems and can be enhanced to understand new patterns as they develop.

Starting from a high-level "trend dashboard" showing aggregate global trends for the entire WLAN – including key over-the-air metrics such as high noise or packet loss for both radios and clients – network managers can drill down through the infrastructure, from controller to APs and to individual clients, to see usage trends and full event histories. Help-desk personnel can replay exact sequences of events by entering the client MAC address and the time period during which a problem occurred. APs and client devices can be located on WLAN "heat maps," visually recreating past RF state.

About Wavelink
Wavelink Communications (www.wavelink.com.au) specialises in the supply, marketing and support of a range of leading edge IP telephony and wireless solutions. Wavelink distributes a range of products from Polycom, Digium and Meru Networks.

About Meru Networks
Meru Networks develops and markets wireless infrastructure solutions that enable the All-Wireless Enterprise. Its industry-leading innovations deliver pervasive, wireless service fidelity for business-critical applications to major Fortune 500 enterprises, universities, healthcare organisations and local, state and federal government agencies. Meru's award-winning Air Traffic Control technology brings the benefits of the cellular world to the wireless LAN environment, and its WLAN System is the only solution on the market that delivers predictable bandwidth and over-the-air quality of service with the reliability, scalability and security necessary to deliver converged voice and data services over a single WLAN infrastructure. Founded in 2002, Meru is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. For more information, visit www.merunetworks.com.