Aruba Atmosphere 2017

By Jeff Joyner

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend my second Aruba Atmosphere Conference from February 26-March 3 this year.  Changing venues from The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas to the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville provided a more relaxed look and feel. Partha Narasimhan, Aruba’s CTO, really acclimated to his surroundings by presenting at the second day’s General Session while wearing a cowboy hat.  There were several great speakers at both General Sessions. The speakers presented new product overviews and customer testimonials.  They even did a demo of Live Upgrade where an automated firmware upgrade was performed on the APs and controllers being used at the conference with no drops in coverage.  That’s putting a lot of trust in your people and technology!

Attending pre-conference ClearPass training was a great way to start the week off.  ClearPass is Aruba’s Network Access Control (NAC) platform which provides wireless and wired guest access management, device onboarding and endpoint posture assessment.  The hands-on training helped to show off the power and scalability of ClearPass.

There were also fantastic individual sessions during the conference announcing new features and products.  Two presenters that stood out were Jussi Kiviniemi from Ekahau and Eric Johnson from Aruba Networks.  Jussi did an entertaining presentation of WiFi network design, comparing wireless design to patrons at a bar.  Funny with a lot of good design nuggets.  Ekahau is a WLAN site survey and planning software and spectrum analysis.  I also had the pleasure of attending two of Eric’s sessions where he breaks down RF technology to its math and science foundation.  It’s hard not to learn something from Eric’s sessions and I am glad I had some caffeine beforehand.  He has an impressive understanding of RF and some of the pitfalls wireless network engineers get into when designing a wireless network.

All in all, it was a great conference.  Ultimately, I’m always looking for new information that I can bring back and use to help our customers work more effectively, be more secure and spend their technology dollars wisely.  For the second year in a row, the Aruba Atmosphere conference did not disappoint.  There’s always more to learn and I am looking forward to next year!

Jeff Joyner is a Senior Network Engineer at Convergent Technologies Group.