Riverside Health Care Systems Deploys Aerohive Wireless LAN

PRLog (Press Release) - Dec. 8, 2009 - SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Aerohive Networks, creators of the award-winning cooperative control wireless LAN (WLAN) architecture, announced today that Riverside Health Care Systems has selected Aerohive's wireless LAN for its four health care facilities in Westchester County, New York. The new wireless LAN has already been deployed at St. Johns Riverside Hospital-Andrus Pavilion, where it supports a bedside documentation application and will also support applications such as bedside registration, drug administration and verification, RFID patient tagging, and guest access. The Aerohive wireless LAN was deployed as part of an ongoing initiative to leverage leading-edge technology to increase staff productivity and to improve the quality of patient care. An in-depth case study of Riverside's selection and deployment of the Aerohive network is available at http://www.aerohive.com/resources/casestudy.html#Riverside.

Challenging Requirements
St. Johns Riverside Hospital-Andrus Pavilion is adjacent to both a 200-unit apartment complex and a 300-office medical park, each with many wireless networks that posed significant RF interference issues. Superior RF performance was therefore a critical requirement for the new network. Other important requirements included high availability, resiliency, scalability, performance, and ease-of-management. Future needs, such as Quality of Service (QoS) and Voice over IP, were also considered. Finally, the solution had to be cost-effective.

The Riverside team evaluated offerings from four other vendors, but each featured a controller-based architecture that presented a potential single point of failure, decreasing resiliency. Even the most promising alternative was designed to have all clients on a single channel across the infrastructure - an option that was not viable given Riverside's challenging RF environment. These architectures simply posed risks that were too great for a health care provider that relies on its wireless LAN for mission-critical applications.

"Overall, Aerohive's wireless LAN proved superior to the controller-based options we considered," said Niall Pariag, senior network administrator, Riverside Health Care Systems. "Aerohive was the only solution that completely met our requirements for depth and reach of APs and RF challenges. We found better density, coverage, and performance with fewer packets blocked on the Aerohive product."

Pioneering Cooperative Control Architecture from Aerohive
Riverside chose Aerohive's cooperative control wireless LAN based on its superior RF performance and also on its ease of implementation and management, built-in security and mobility, better scalability and performance, lower TCO, and its ability to seamlessly upgrade to higher-bandwidth 802.11n equipment. Aerohive's cooperative control networks are more reliable than controller-based networks, because controllers' single points of failure are eliminated. Removing controllers from the network also eliminates bandwidth bottlenecks, latency, and jitter that result from backhauling traffic through a controller, creating an ideal platform for demanding applications that Riverside may deploy in the future, such as VoWLAN. Eliminating controllers from the network also substantially reduces the cost of Aerohive solutions.

Riverside's network administrator was also impressed with Aerohive's Dynamic Airtime Scheduling, which dramatically improves wireless LAN performance by preventing fast clients from being slowed down by slower clients.

"Aerohive had future-proof technology, central management, built-in security and mobility, better scalability and performance, simpler implementation and management, and lower cost of ownership," Pariag continued. "It gave us more bang for the buck."

"Aerohive's wireless LANs are perfectly suited for healthcare providers with limited IT resources seeking to support mission-critical applications," said David Flynn, chief executive officer, Aerohive Networks. "Our pioneering approach to wireless LANs costs less than controller-based alternatives and also provides even better resiliency, performance, and scalability. IT departments at more and more healthcare providers are selecting Aerohive."

About Aerohive Networks
Aerohive unleashes the potential of enterprise Wi-Fi, enabling customers to stop buying copper, to move applications to the air, and to maximize workforce productivity. The company's award-winning cooperative architecture eliminates costly controllers, saving money and providing unprecedented resiliency, up to 10X better application performance, and an opportunity to start small and expand without limitations. Aerohive was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. The company's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Northern Light Venture Capital. For more information, please visit www.aerohive.com or call 408-988-9918.