Following its acquisition of Xirrus earlier this year, Riverbed Technology today unveiled the first wireless access point to be added to the Riverbed product portfolio.
Bruce Miller, vice president of product marketing for Riverbed, says the Riverbed Xirrus Wave 2 AP Model XD2-230 provides 3.9 Gbps of bandwidth that should enable IT organizations to not only support demand for wireless bandwidth for several years to come, but also consolidate many of the wireless access points they already have installed.
“IT organizations today don’t know how much demand there’s going to be for wireless access,” says Miller. “This allows them to future proof their networks.”
Capable of being managed via the cloud or using an on-premises cloud, Miller says the Xirrus family of access points are now part of a larger Riverbed strategy to converge the management of all local area and wide area network (WAN) services being delivered at the edge of an enterprise network.
Miller says as software-defined networking matures, the process of unifying how network services at the edge are acquired and delivered has already begun. It’s not clear just yet how long that transition will take. But at this point, it’s already apparent that the line between local and wide area network services continues to get blurrier with each passing day.
