Ruckus, a part of Brocade, now offers both wired and wireless networking for enterprise, hospitality, service provider, government and small-and-medium business (SMB) customers worldwide.
By combining its industry-leading wireless products with the ICX wired switching portfolio from Brocade, Ruckus now offers a complete line of high-performance access infrastructure designed to optimise the end-user experience, simplify network setup and management for IT managers, and help business leaders deliver great experiences for their employees, guests and customers.
As part of its expanded offering to deliver simply better connections, Ruckus announced a new multi-gigabit solution that delivers more efficient performance while providing flexible scalability and simplified management to meet the needs of businesses and organisations of all types and sizes.
“The expansion of Ruckus to include both wired and wireless products is a tremendous opportunity for us to carry forward the outstanding ICX product line and technology innovation we have gained as part of Brocade,” says Dan Rabinovitsj, chief operating officer of Ruckus. “Combining the product lines means we can offer our partners a comprehensive set of access infrastructure and meet customers’ networking needs beyond simply wireless, without sacrificing performance. Our new multi-gig solution sets the tone for the type of innovation to come.”
The new ICX 7150 Z-Series switch and Ruckus R720 access point (AP) together solve the problems associated with increasing device densities and bandwidth-consuming applications by maximising network access performance with a complete multi-gigabit 802.11ac Wave 2 solution. The Ruckus solution does not require the need to rip and replace existing CAT 5e cabling infrastructure – the switch and AP can simply be dropped into current environments, thus substantially saving costs and installation time while increasing performance.
The latest addition to the Ruckus portfolio also includes Cloudpath Enrollment System software, a security and policy management platform that enables organisations to easily establish secure, policy-based access for all wired and wireless devices. Cloudpath is infrastructure-agnostic, allowing organisations to apply a single unified approach to device security and policy, regardless of client OS or underlying networking infrastructure.
“The announcement that Ruckus will expand its solution set by fully incorporating wired Ethernet switching into its portfolio makes absolute sense and was expected as part of the acquisition announcement from ARRIS earlier this year,” said Nolan Greene, senior research analyst, IDC. “With this new multi-gig solution, Ruckus is formally expressing its intent to be a dominant player in the network access infrastructure market for its target segments–education, hospitality, service provider, government and SMB.”
End-user quality-of-service expectations are increasing but IT budgets and time aren’t rising with them. Ruckus has developed two new products designed to work in combination to deliver the performance end users expect with the scalability, manageability and value IT departments require:
* Ruckus ICX 7150 Z-Series Switch. A full-featured layer 3-capable 48-port switch that includes sixteen 2.5 GbE ports and thirty-two 10/100/1000 ports. The 7150-Z includes dual hot-swappable power supplies and fans and is stackable with other switches in the ICX 7150 family. Eight 10 GbE uplink/stacking ports doubles stacking and uplink bandwidth over previous ICX 7150 models.
* Ruckus R720 Access Point. A 4×4:4 dual-band 802.11ac Wave 2 AP with one 10/100/1000 and one 2.5 GbE port. Featuring patented BeamFlex+ and ChannelFly technologies, the R720 is capable of 160MHz and 80+80MHz channelisation and is designed for use in high-density indoor applications.
When paired, the new switch and AP solve the IT challenge of accommodating spiking network traffic, caused by increased device density and bandwidth-intensive applications, while minimising deployment time and expense.
