I personally am a huge fan of football. I love to watch any level of the sport, but there is just something special about the NFL and the unbelievable level of play that it showcases on “any given Sunday” (or Monday, or Thursday…you get the point). I consider myself a “stat head”. I have my favorite team that I watch (GO Broncos!), but I also watch quite a few more games. I am constantly intrigued by special performances and the incredible stat line.

 

Over the years I have supplemented this love by playing fantasy football. I still find myself pouring over games or stat sheets and looking at what players have done and who is out there chasing greatness or even history.

 

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Right now, football fans have been treated to one, if not the best, 5 year stretches that any player has put together, much less at wide receiver. Antonio Brown has put up numbers at a truly incredible pace. He has 5 straight 100 catch seasons (NFL record). Brown has the most receiving yards, and the most catches of any wide receiver in a 5 year span, in NFL history. His accomplishments are amazing, but what is even more amazing is the constant hard work he puts in day in and day out. Brown is known for his off season workouts, they are the stuff of a “you tube” legend. He is a competitor that is constantly working on his craft. He wants and strives to be better every time he steps on the football field.

 

As a die hard Broncos fan, I HATE when Denver has to face him. No matter how good our defense is, he still seems to find a way to make an impact on the game. I, of course, root against him, but I equally respect him. I see someone who is the best of the best, but not resting on that, and instead pushing constantly to improve himself. It fascinates me, what is it that is makes him push so much? For him, it seems, what he has done is irrelevant.  He focuses only on what he is going to do. There are several other examples of this in the world of professional sports (Tom Brady, Lebron James, Cristiano Ronaldo, to just name a few). We may love them, or root fanatically against them, but in the end we (grudgingly) respect them.

 

Legendary Players

 

It is not just in professional sports where this particular phenomenon happens. In technology, you know the legendary players, you might even be naming them off in your head right now. Each of those players are constantly trying to improve themselves and their products to continue to control their share of the market. Sometimes this works, sometime it fails, but a great company never stops working and improving upon itself.

 

Aruba OS8 and Mobility Master Upgrade

 

One specific example of this is HPE/Aruba and their introduction of Aruba OS8 and the Mobility Master Upgrade. OS8 is basically a ground-up rewrite of the Aruba Operating System Code (think Tiger Woods rebuilding his swing right after he dominated the 1997 masters). HPE/Aruba changed the game with the capabilities of their Aruba OS 6.7 and now are pushing/expanding this further to truly manage and encompass the digital workplace.

 

They know we have many workers in our companies today that need and use mobile business critical devices. This new OS and upgrade are giving IT professionals the power to manage this by enabling an “always-on” network delivered with an Intelligent WLAN that is predictive and improves the network efficiency. With a massive amount of traffic hitting our networks from a variety of mobile devices, HPE/Aruba has developed technology through their Mobility Master that uses Controller Clustering, Live Upgrade (no downtime), as well as Multi OS Support to drastically increase the availability of the network.

 

 

Here are some features that Controller Clustering alone, can provide:

 

Hitless failover – Users will not notice any issues in the rare event of a controller failure. Voice calls, video, data transfers would all continue without noticeable impact. User session information is shared across controllers in the cluster to ensure there is no single point of failure for any user.

Automatic user load balancing – Users are distributed evenly across controllers to prevent congestion on a single controller. This ensures a large amount of available throughput for each user even when massive crowds gather.

Automatic AP load balancing – The access points automatically are load balanced across cluster of controller for better resource utilization and high availability when controller goes down. AP load balancing is done in seamless fashion so users are not affected.

Seamless roaming – Users do not experience any delays while moving through a large campus while on mission critical applications such as a Skype for Business call. All of the controllers in a cluster work together to manage the users. A user can roam across 10,000 APs without ever getting a new IP address, re-authenticating, or losing firewall state information.

 

Live Upgrade is also a fantastic step forward with its capability of letting you upgrade to the latest OS in real time and giving your users minimal downtime for their business critical applications. When you combine these features with the capability of running through Multiple different OS’s, then you can see how this is truly a huge step forward in what you will be able to do.

 

In the end, HPE/Aruba believes in this technology and the step forward it provides. They are also offering incredible pricing on this so that all of their current customers can take advantage of this technology. Now through the end of this month, they are offering up to 63% off list price on select bundles. If you are not an HPE/Aruba customer, they are offering competitive pricing to get your company into this platform. Even though, they believe that no one can truly compete with all they have to offer. Either way, contact your sales rep for more details today!