Breaking up with old network paradigms

We’ve all seen it.

You walk into a switch closet and look around. Dust lies thick upon ancient switches—enough to dim LED lights in some cases. A herd of dust bunnies has taken up residence near the fan vents. Nobody has seen the power outlets in years, buried under grime and cobwebs.

The soft hum of equipment fills the air as the tech next to you beams. “It may be old, but it works!”

And if it doesn’t?

“At least we know all of the bugs and have workarounds,” says our new IT friend.

Of course, they do. But what if they absolutely must upgrade? Then what?

Anyone who has ever worked in IT knows the drill. You don’t upgrade firmware unless absolutely necessary. And you never, ever reboot. Why?

“It might not come back,” whispers the network engineer with a shiver. “You never know what will happen if you reboot or upgrade equipment.”

It almost sounds like superstition, but it’s plain practical sense and the reason so many IT departments put off upgrades—hardware and software—as long as possible. The purpose of IT is to deliver network and computing services and anything that takes that down, or puts it at risk, is a Big Problem.

Nobody Wants Downtime: Unless It’s in Hawaii

IT is about maximizing services and minimizing risk of downtime. Why take a chance with new and exciting bugs that will keep you late at the office or working through an extended maintenance period over the weekend?

Which brings us back to those packs of dust bunnies roaming wild and free through switching closets everywhere.

Eventually, time runs out and you need to upgrade for a new capability required by the business. We get that and we understand you because many of us have lived in that world. That’s why here at Ruckus we’ve spent so much time building products that minimize risk without sacrificing new capabilities:

• Technologies like campus fabric and RF innovations in access points designed to optimize network performance and increase reliability
• Switches with plenty of POE budget for any application need
• The most scalable network controller architecture which, in virtualized form, SmartZone is almost limitless in its ability to be upgraded without a rip-and-replace
• In-service stack updates (ISSU) for switches or multi-image AP deployments allow in-place upgrades without slowing down the network

How to Make a 1Gbps Connection Go Faster than 1Gbps

An age-old problem. You’ve got switches in the closets with 1Gbps uplinks, but you need something faster.

“Here we go,” sighs my IT tech guide. “I spent all this time building the network and now we’re going to change just for a little speed boost.”

What if you could make a 1 Gbps uplink port go faster? With the ICX 7150 switch Ruckus did just that. Buy it with 1 Gbps uplinks today and, when you’re ready, a simple command and license will upgrade to 10 Gbps uplinks. No new hardware.

My network engineer pauses to consider, eyes narrowed. “No hardware swap? What about a reboot? I bet there’s a reboot.”

Nope. No new hardware. No new software. No reboots.

This is why when we ask our customers what they like about their Ruckus network the answer is unanimous: “It just works.”

And we like that just fine.