Aruba launches dense Wi-Fi architecture

"Together with our partner Ortronics, we are revolutionising the cost, deployment and performance models for enterprise wireless," said Don LeBeau, president and chief executive of Aruba Wireless Networks in a statement. "Driving down the cost of wireless deployment and putting the control back in the hands of IT staff is the vision that we're committed to and a promise on which we are delivering."

As part of the Wireless Grid Architecture, Aruba has teamed up with Ortronics to use the latter's Wi-Fi Jack, a combined dual Cat-5 network wall panel and access point. It has also introduced the Aruba 5100 WLAN Switch, which has a claimed processing capacity of nearly 2 Gbps of 802.11i/AES encrypted traffic as standard, expandable to 3.6Gbps with redundancy, and the Aruba 60 series of thin access points for 802.11a/b/g. The software that manages these and the dense wireless network they are designed to produce costs $200 per access point per annum. Other pricing and availability will be announced in September.