June launch for Trapeze Networks' high-wireless act

The WLAN Mobility System includes the Mobility Exchange, Mobility Points, Mobility System Software and the RingMaster tool suite. Together they share a system-wide control plane and data plane that the company said delivers secure user mobility, seamless wired and wireless integration and tools to plan and manage large enterprises—before and after deployment.

Trapeze is entering an increasingly crowded market, with companies such as Aruba Networks and Airespace already selling a similar concept. And Cisco Systems, from where several of the senior executives of the start-up came, is likely to be the toughest competitor.

The Mobility Exchange features twenty 10/100 Mbit/s Power over Ethernet (PoE) ports and two Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. The Mobility Points come in two versions, a single radio that supports 802.11a or 802.11b and a dual radio that supports 802.11a and 802.11b.

Perhaps the most novel aspect of the product is the system management software that bundles most of the management capabilities into the LAN switch.

"Some WLAN vendors attempt to solve Layer 2 problems using complicated Layer 3 technology and others try to solve the problems with single, point product appliances that do not scale," said George Prodan, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Trapeze.

"Trapeze is the first company to take a systems approach to WLANs. We solved enterprise security and rogue detection issues early on, but kept them under wraps until user mobility, system-wide planning, deployment and management, and a seamless fit with current infrastructure could be rolled into one complete solution," Prodan said.

Such an approach has drawn praise from industry analysts. "The Trapeze Mobility Exchange creates a new category of network devices that enable WLAN systems to deliver the same level of utility and security as wired infrastructures, with the added benefit of mobility," said Jim Metzler, network industry specialist at Ashton, Metzler & Associates. "It's the most comprehensive and well-thought-out WLAN solution I've seen and perhaps the most innovative system to emerge from networking in over a decade."

The Mobility System integrates with current networks, eliminating the cost and complexity of having separate wired and wireless LANs. In this way Trapeze preserves existing network engineering—VLAN and subnet assignments, authentications and ACLs—while enabling the deployment of new services like prioritization, access controls, roaming policies, location tracking and usage metrics on a per-user basis from wired to wireless.

Authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) is also tightly integrated with the Mobility System, which offloads extensible authentication protocol processing, session consolidation, and hardware-accelerated encryption and key generation from AAA servers. The company said this reduces 802.1X authenticators by 20-to-1 and gives AAA servers tremendous scale.

While other vendors force users to re-authenticate when they associate with a new AP, the Trapeze Mobility system allows seamless roaming throughout the infrastructure without re-authenticating each time. This preserves users' connection, IP session and authorization information wherever they roam.

Trapeze also supports standard WLAN cryptography, including Wi-Fi Protected Access, the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol, the Advanced Encryption Standard, and dynamic Wired Equivalent Privacy with rotating roadcast/multicast keys.

Trapeze Networks was launched in March 2002 and received $16 million in first-round financing from Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures. The management team came from leading networking companies such as Nortel, Redback Networks and Extreme Networks, as well as Cisco.