Xirrus Application Control

Moving the network intelligence out to the edge of the network, Xirrus Application Control represents the new paradigm for wireless infrastructure design. More akin to wired switch architectures than traditional wireless solutions, the distributed architecture of the Xirrus Array enables high performance network services such as Application Control to operate directly at the network edge, resulting in a scalable and resilient network that ultimately produces a better user experience.

Visibility

The first key component of Xirrus Application Control is providing a level of visibility into what is happening on the network. While most wireless infrastructure systems provide user, device, network, and location context, the actual applications that users are running on the network is typically invisible to IT. Yet this information can be the most critical to profiling and managing network usage.

Application Control enables Xirrus Arrays to recognize over 900 of the most popular business and recreational applications. These applications are organized into 15 categories: Collaboration, Games, Remote Access, VPN, Database, Mail, Networking, Monitoring, Social, Web, File Transfer, Messaging, Proxy, Streaming, and Xirrus. Applications are identified and tracked per client, per VLAN, and per Array in real-time dashboard views and historical reporting to determine what applications are running and how much traffic they are generating.

Key Differentiation

The unique Xirrus Array architecture affords a number of key differences compared to traditional Wi-Fi solutions.

Based on a distributed architecture, all traffic processing and network services are executed at the network edge on the built-in controller operating within each Array. With Application Control, the distribution of DPI functionality across all Arrays in the network is not compromised by any single point of failure in the network. It offers greater scalability as DPI performance grows linearly as Arrays are added to the network. This in contrast to centralized application gateways that present a stair step upgrade path at significant cost when scaling upwards.