Aiming to ease the pain of the Bring Your Own Device wave that many companies are feeling, Enterasys Networks is rolling out an edge networking architecture to unify wired and wireless networks, the company announced this week. The OneFabric Edge architecture is designed to help organizations push applications to mobile users on a large scale and in a way that provides consistent performance and security.

With OneFabric Edge, companies can consolidate management and security of both wired and wireless networks into one virtual platform. Mobile app delivery can be managed with "a single pane of glass," so customers require 75 percent less manpower for managing it, says Enterasys, a unit of Siemens Enterprise Communications. The IT department gets greater visibility into the network and the ability to deliver applications to mobile devices from virtual servers for cloud computing and data center situations.

OneFabric Edge comes with a just-unveiled Wireless Services Engine, which Enterasys calls "the industry's first virtualized WLAN controller for application services." It offers an integrated virtual platform to facilitate control, security and management.

What do analysts have to say about it? Here the takeaway from Jon Oltsik, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group: 

"Delivering applications to mobile users at a large scale requires a fresh approach to architecting wired and wireless networks. Continuing to treat them as separate access networks doesn't make business sense as it significantly adds to complexity, high costs and an unpredictable mobile user experience. Enterasys addresses this with an integrated architecture for unified wired/wireless networking which simplifies the access layer architecture and provides IT with granular controls to securely manage and deploy mission critical business applications and services for mobile users."

For more:
- see the Enterasys release

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