GEC NEWS WIREAruba, a HPE company said that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is upgrading its wireless network with Aruba 802.11ac Wave 2 access points and mobility controllers. The world’s largest physics lab, in which the Worldwide Web originated, is moving to a state-of-the-art wireless campus to ensure maximal workplace productivity for the 12,000 staff, visiting scientists and contract workers onsite everyday who require secure gigabit mobility across CERN’s 200+ building campus.
To enable its staff and scientists to achieve their research goals, CERN decided to upgrade its infrastructure to provide a modern, mobile-first campus that could accommodate the nearly 20,000 different devices that need to connect to the network daily. Reliable coverage across its campus, enabling visiting scientists and workers to use their own mobile devices, and the ability to properly sandbox visitor devices and detect ‘rogue’ access points, were key concerns for the CERN IT staff.
“Moving from our current network to a controller-based network that enables seamless roaming from one building to another and can help us provide different levels of connectivity based on the type of user connecting were top priorities for us,” said Tony Cass, Leader of the Communications Systems Group and Physicist at CERN.
While CERN already had a high-performance HPE wired network in place, they wanted to update their wireless network to keep up with user demands for greater mobility. Following a call for proposals with strict requirements, CERN determined that upgrading to Aruba 802.11ac Wave 2 access points and controllers, along with Aruba AirWave for network management, could provide the coverage, security, reliability and centralized management capabilities they were looking for.
