Isle of Wight County Schools Deploy Aerohive Networks for its Controller-Less WLAN Solution

Aerohive Helps Historic Community Bolster Students' Education with Online Learning and Testing

SUNNYVALE, Calif., December 15, 2010 - Aerohive Networks, creators of the award-winning cooperative control wireless LAN (WLAN) architecture, today announced that Isle of Wight County, one of the oldest county governments in the U.S., dating back to the 17th century, has implemented an Aerohive controller-less WLAN solution throughout its nine K-12 school campuses. The county is comprised of 5,500 students attending one of nine K-12 schools: two high schools, two middle schools and five elementary schools. There are 900 faculty and staff teaching and administrating the education process.

News Facts

  • Isle of Wight County Schools in Virginia went with an Aerohive WLAN solution in order to meet a state imposed mandate to make it possible for their students to take Standards of Learning (SOL) tests online.
  • Virginia students now take nearly two million SOL tests online annually, and by 2013, online will be the primary delivery mode for all SOL assessments. The benefits to online testing is it allows results to be provided more quickly, and it provides innovative test items that challenge students to better demonstrate what they’ve learned. Going wireless in all of Isle of Wight's county schools was imperative to meet these demands.
  • Other key drivers for Isle of Wight's decision to implement a WLAN solution were for flexibility and convenience. Every teacher has a laptop and access to mobile carts with 30 iPods on them to check out and share amongst their students. Over time the schools plan to use iPads and voice and video over wireless in the classroom so going with a forward looking wireless vendor was extremely important as well.
  • The Isle of Wight chose Aerohive for its unique controller-less approach to wireless networking, centralized network management and fast/failover capabilities for future voice and video requirements, after evaluating solutions from Cisco, Aruba and Xirrus.
  • Isle of Wight's Aerohive WLAN currently includes about 200 APs that serve both faculty and students. Originally the schools used Apple AirPort and Linksys routers for spotty Wi-Fi coverage, but now they have a comprehensive reliable WLAN to handle the student and faculty-generated Wi-Fi traffic.
  • Security was also important to Isle of Wight. They needed to have the ability to have secure SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers). They also wanted the ability to have a guest portal and authentication to Active Directory and LDAP. With the Aerohive WLAN solution they get all of these features and more.

Comments

"We chose Aerohive over the competition because of their controller-less architecture," said Joshua Spaugh, Director of Technology, Isle of Wight County Schools.

"Going controller-less was important because it meant we were avoiding the issue of having a single point of failure. We really wanted to avoid that hit to the network."

"Also, performance is important. It just never made sense to route all the traffic to the same device over the network because you really lose speed with that approach. I just didn't see the benefits of a controller-based WLAN when Aerohive could provide the intelligence and control without the controller."

About Aerohive Networks
Aerohive unleashes the potential of enterprise Wi-Fi, enabling customers to stop buying copper, to move applications to the air, and to maximize workforce productivity. The company's award-winning cooperative architecture eliminates costly controllers, saving money and providing unprecedented resiliency, up to 10X better application performance, and an opportunity 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, and Northern Light Venture Capital. For more information, please visit www.aerohive.com, call us at 408-510-6100 or follow us on Twitter @Aerohive, subscribe to our blog or become a fan on our Facebook page.

(1) Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Wireless LAN Infrastructure (Global), 2010" by Timothy Zimmerman and Michael King, February 12, 2010.