Extricom Announces Switch Cascade

PRLog (Press Release) - May 20, 2009 -
New York, NY and Tel Aviv, Israel - Extricom, the leading provider of enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) infrastructure systems, today announced the release of the EXSW-1632C Switch Cascade. Designed for mission critical and extreme RF environments, Switch Cascade dramatically scales Extricom’s Channel Blanket architecture, extending the continuous mobility zone to twice the previous size. Switch Cascade also provides the option of a fully redundant wireless LAN infrastructure, allowing for high-availability scenarios to be supported by an edge WLAN product, an industry first.

Targeting environments such as factories, hospitals and sports stadiums, Switch Cascade enables enterprises to overcome the challenges of maintaining continuous, resilient coverage in large-scale WLAN infrastructures.

“With Switch Cascade, we are now able to deliver fully redundant WLAN systems that support high availability applications at a lower price point than simply doubling the infrastructure,” stated Phil Belanger, Extricom’s VP of Marketing and Business Development. “Extricom’s Switch Cascade provides a new level of operational versatility to enterprises looking to maximise the utility of their WLAN deployment. The customer can choose to deploy 100% AP redundancy, where there is no performance loss even if a switch failure occurs, or they may use some of the additional APs to cover a larger area.”

Extricom’s EXSW-1632C Switch Cascade consists of two conjoined 16-port switches. The switches can be positioned several hundred metres apart and their collective APs create a single seamless channel blanket. The switches can also be deployed in a fully redundant primary/secondary mode to ensure continuous network access even if there is an AP or switch failure. Switch Cascade is compatible with any 802.11a/b/g/n wireless client and interoperable with all Extricom APs, which allow up to four independent coverage blankets to be configured from the same physical infrastructure. It is available as a new hardware product, the EXSW-1632C; or as an upgrade to existing Extricom deployments through a firmware upgrade and an EXSW-1600 that is configured to be the secondary switch in the cascade.

“In today’s economic climate, our customers are looking for products that can support widely divergent deployment scenarios without requiring additional modules or licenses,” commented Gideon Rottem, CEO of Extricom. “In introducing Switch Cascade, Extricom is providing a highly flexible product tailored to the needs and demands of our customer base, one that fills the gaps other WLAN vendors’ products cannot.”

Using healthcare as an example, Belanger concludes; “High availability is mandatory for many healthcare deployments. A single EXSW-1632C can provide complete physical redundancy in a dense implementation of access points to support mission-critical activities such as medical telemetry, voice communications, RFID, and real time access to electronic medical records from the same WLAN infrastructure.”