Devinator

Dear Grandma,

I thought you might be curious as to why all that stuff about the bulls and the bees matters.  I told you the “what”, but I thought I’d write you another letter briefly explaining the “why.”

Why It Matters

There’s a long list of reasons why it matters, and some of them are hard to draw parallels to things you might understand, but I’ll give a few of them a try. 

Scalability, Throughput, and Management Complexity

What if Grandpa wanted grow the business a bit?  Think about the expense, time, and difficulty of adding and coordinating a number of Apollos, each Apollo being physically constrained by the number of heifers he could service per day.  Think about how much time Grandpa would spend managing the situation if he had 5 Apollos breeding 10 heifers per day.  Phone calls to heifer owners, reports, schedules, dealing with sick Apollos all the time…holy smokes at all of the confusion and overhead.  Having just one Apollo is bad enough, being kinda cranky the way he is sometimes, but imagine having to deal with the headache of a barn full of Apollos.  It’s more than I’d care to think about.  It’s exactly the same way with our competitor’s controllers.  They are limited in the number of controller-based APs they support, they are a bottleneck, the WNMS has to manage each of them separately….it’s just a pain I’ll tell ya.

Now contrast that with managing one bee hive with 50 bees in it…or 500, or maybe even 5,000 bees in it.  Which would you rather manage?  It’s all just one big lump sum of bees.  They all work the same way, they’re pretty much self-sustaining, and managing 50 bees is roughly the same amount of work as managing a million bees – it’s just a hive.  Aerohive’s system is just like this: one WNMS and one set of HiveAPs acting as a group called a hive.  The HiveAPs work together to control the hive and to perform all real-time network operations.

Increased Reliability

Imagine if Apollo got sick…or worse yet…died.  Where would you and Grandpa be then?  Up a creek I think.  Maybe Grandpa needs a bull named Zeus to go along with Apollo…but wait, that would cost several thousand dollars to buy and more money to maintain and manage each year.  It would make sure you never went without, and it would give you more capacity, but at what cost? 

Now contrast that against the bees.  Oh no!  A bee is sick!…no wait…it died!!  Let’s have a funeral…oh sorry, no time, another bee was just born, let’s celebrate!  In Aerohive-speak, we call this, “no single point of failure.”  There’s no one death (not even the Queen bee) that can bring everything to a grinding halt.  To a company who is counting on this wireless technology to “just work”, they usually prefer the bee model over the bull model.

Increased security

Let’s say you bought Grandpa a new pocket watch for his birthday.  Would you hide it in the barn with Apollo or in the beehive?  Think of the differences like this:

·      If Apollo was sleeping, eating, or pooping, you could sneak all the way into his barn before he’d even notice that you were there.  The same is true of our competitor’s solution.  It sits in the center of the network, and when client data needs to be inspected, it’s inspected after it goes all the way to the center of the network instead of at the edge of the network like it should be.

·      When’s the last time you caught a beehive off-guard?  Those jokers are apt to put a hurtin’ on you just about anytime you go and stir them up.  Folks who don’t believe that should reach into the hive and snag some honeycomb sometime.  Aerohive’s security is an edge-based, coordinated approach, offering all of the “regular” features plus many unique features.

Increased deployment flexibility & simplicity

Suppose that Grandpa got up one morning, strolled down to the barn, and told Apollo to handle all of the breeding on his own today because Grandpa is taking the day off.  Yeah, that’s a great idea.  There’s nothing “automatic” about Apollo you know – and just think about five such Apollos…yeeks! 

It’s no different with controllers really – there’s just nothing automatic.  There’s always some “issue” to worry about with local controllers, master controllers, blade controllers, stand alone appliance controllers, virtual controllers, cloud controllers, branch controllers, cluster controllers, backup controllers, N+1 controllers, controller licenses….it just goes on forever and ever.  “Control”, and often “data” as well, has to be backhauled to these controllers (wherever they might be made to live) making the entire network design unnecessarily complicated!  The funny thing is that none of those controllers are needed at all because HiveAPs can do the same functions.

Bees don’t have a controller, and boy do they get along well!  They work and work fast!  Putting out new beehive locations is pretty snappy.  The bees, which in Aerohive’s case equates to our control plane protocol suite called Cooperative Control, just automatically do their thing – no human interaction required.  Companies can just throw HiveAPs around wherever needed, in any role they need, and voilà (that’s a fancy new French word I learned Grandma).

Decreased costs

See, the way I got it figured, nobody likes to give away his or her money for no good reason.  If HiveAPs can do what controllers do, by way of using free control-plane protocols, then controllers are no longer necessary in enterprise Wi-Fi.  If controllers are no longer needed, then why do all of those vendors keep selling them?  I figure they’re just unnecessarily hosin’ people.  Now all of that may sound like Greek to you Grandma, so I’ll try to translate it for you.   

As you know, a beehive is self-fertilizing, self-feeding, self-organizing, and pretty much self-sufficient.  There are worker bees, drones, the queen, and so forth.  Drones mate with the queen to create new bees while worker bees get other stuff done.  This is a really good model.  To be competitive with this model, our competitors would have to kill off their Apollo (too slow, expensive, and hard to manage) and have only heifers.  If their heifers then had some effective methods of immaculate conception and self-feeding, then it would be a fair competition.  Bees are just much more organized, self-sufficient, and “automatic” as a group, and this is how Aerohive’s technology works as well.

In a nutshell, less components means less costs.  No Apollo means no barn to own/maintain, no grain mix to buy, no poop clean-up to do, no breeding coordination phone calls and trips, no shots to keep him from getting sick, and the list goes on and on.  If you think about not having 5 Apollos (at a large scale), you can really see how the savings start to add up.

I really should let you get some rest now Grandma.  All this techno-babble can really make a person tired.   Please give my best to Grandpa, and let him know that bees are better than bulls.  I’m sure he’ll know what that means.

Devinator