Aerohive Demonstrates Industry First Bonjour Gateway to Enable Apple AirPlay and Apple AirPrint across Multi-Subnet Enterprise Networks

Technology will Massively Simplify the use of iPads and Apple TVs in the Enterprise and Education Markets

Sunnyvale, Calif. — March 5, 2012 — Aerohive Networks™, the pioneer in cloud-enabled enterprise networking infrastructure, today announced a new feature, that enables management and control of Apple’s® “Zero-Configuration Networking”  technology, called Bonjour®, to make services such as AirPrint™ and AirPlay® usable across large, multi-subnet networks regardless of the underlying topology. Aerohive’s new patent-pending Bonjour Gateway, will be delivered as a software upgrade for existing customers and as an out-of-band device compatible with customers’ legacy wireless and wired networks.

News Facts

  • With the increasing prevalence of Apple devices on both enterprise and education networks, particularly with new bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives, it is necessary for the network infrastructure to be natively aware of Bonjour, Apple’s service advertisement and configuration technology.  Bonjour (or Zero-Configuration Networking) is used to configure services like printing, file services, and remote display with Apple TV.
  • Multicast DNS-based Bonjour is a layer 2 non-routable protocol, and hence, does not work across subnets. Virtually every enterprise, school and university has more than one subnet. To address this, Aerohive is introducing native Bonjour awareness into our products to support “Zero-Configuration Networking” for Apple products across the entire network (not just a single subnet) regardless of the underlying topology.
  • For legacy wireless and wired networks, a single Aerohive device with Bonjour Gateway functionality could be connected out-of-band via a VLAN trunk and provide Bonjour advertisements across each of the associated subnets. Thus greatly simplifying the deployment of Apple devices into networks without any change to the current network topology.
  • The Bonjour Gateway leverages the distributed intelligence and service-aware capabilities of Aerohive’s Cooperative Control architecture. This approach and the awareness of the Bonjour protocol allow Aerohive to control Bonjour on any network, limit unnecessary service updates, and filter unwanted services, or devices, from being advertised across subnets.
  • As an out-of-band technology, the Bonjour Gateway only participates in the network service advertisement and not the service (AirPlay, AirPrint) itself, allowing the enterprises existing security policy to be maintained and ensuring the gateway does not become a bottleneck.
  • Use cases
    • AirPlay from iOS (and OSX Mountain Lion) devices projecting via Apple TVs
      • Schools and enterprises are using Apple TVs (AirPlay) to mirror iPad® screens on to projector screens for presentations. This functionality is often required from a separate student, teacher or guest network.
    • AirPrint from iOS devices
      • BYOD and corporate iPad initiatives together with the availability of AirPrint capable printers drives the demand for print services. These devices and resources are often on separate networks.
      • Educational networks will often separate networks into a student network and a teacher network. AirPrint advertisements can be made available to both networks with this technology.
  • Aerohive’s Bonjour Gateway will be available for beta trials in Q2 and will ship midyear 2012.
  • Aerohive’s Bonjour Gateway is demonstrated in a video blog demo here and a technology brief available here.

Comments

“We're very excited by this feature because we use iPads and iPod touches® in our one-to-one programs in the school system,” said Phil Hardin, Executive Director of Technology for the Rowan-Salisbury School System.  “Our programs use these mobile devices to improve the teaching and learning environment in the classroom by enabling teachers and students to share information and multimedia projects through AirPlay.  Aerohive's new technology will enable us to use AirPlay and AirPrint with multi-subnet network architectures and will preserve the ease of use we have and expect from our Apple devices.”

“We like the look of this feature very much,” said Damian Glasfurd-Brown, Director of IT for The Leys School in Cambridge, England. “We are experimenting with AirPlay as a means of delivering iPad screens to classroom projectors via Apple TVs.  We will eventually have teachers’ iPads, pupils’ iPads, and Apple TVs in separate subnets.  The ability to have the Bonjour traffic carried through the Aerohive network will potentially save us quite a lot of effort in router configuration.”

“As more employees bring their consumer devices into the enterprise, BYOD is becoming a critical movement that IT administrators must support,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “As iPads become more prevalent business tools, giving the iDevices the ability to print and project to Apple TVs from any subnet in the network is a must-have feature. Aerohive is once again leading the BYOD initiative by releasing new features for its enterprise Cooperative Control wireless solution to enable Bonjour communication across all networks in the enterprise.”

About Aerohive Networks

Aerohive Networks reduces the cost and complexity of today’s networks with cloud-enabled, distributed Wi-Fi and routing solutions for enterprises and mid-market companies including branch offices and teleworkers. Aerohive’s award-winning cooperative control Wi-Fi architecture, public or private cloud-enabled network management, routing and VPN solutions eliminate costly controllers and single points of failure. This gives its customers mission critical reliability with granular security and policy enforcement and the ability to start small and expand without limitations. Aerohive was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. The company's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northern Light Venture Capital and New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA). For more information, please visit www.aerohive.com, call us at 408-510-6100, follow us on Twitter @Aerohive, subscribe to our blog or become a fan on our Facebook page.

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