Foundry switches on to wireless upgrades
Firm unveils offerings a year after entering the WLAN market
Foundry is to offer wireless networking software upgrades for its switches, a year after belatedly entering the wireless LAN (WLAN) market.
"More than 100 of our customers have deployed our wireless products," said Bob Schiff, vice-president and general manager for Layer 4-7 security at Foundry.
"We have now introduced software for our switches to make them wireless aware. In many ways we have caught up with the opposition, but in many others, we have gone past them."
Among new developments from the firm are the IronPoint 200 virtual access point (AP), the IronView Network Manager software, upgrade modules and complete WLAN edge switches for 24 to 96 ports, and Power over Ethernet options on switches.
All will be available immediately, except for an advanced version of IronView Network Manager which will ship later this year. New capabilities include L3 roaming for voice over Wi-Fi.
The virtual AP allows managers to partition APs into eight virtual ones with their own service set identifiers to give different types of access to different users.
As a number of new firms have come to market with WLAN products and management suites in the past two years vendors such as Foundry, Hewlett-Packard and Extreme have hit back.
"Even with the Ironport 200, we have been able to demonstrate that we can keep up with standards through software upgrades rather than hardware swap-out, which is what our competitors have to do," claimed Schiff.
Denny Meijer, technical director at reseller Scalable Networks, said he has not come across Foundry much when selling Extreme solutions.
"Some vendors are extending virtual LANs across WLANs, and that has the same end result as a virtual AP might. But it's a different solution. It does sound as if what they have released is aimed at keeping up with the competition," said Meijer.