Allen, I apologize in advance for the long reply, but I believe we have a lot of useful experience to share from Liberty University.
We totally replaced our wireless network and the wireless portion of our NAC over Christmas break in 2008, so I feel your pain. You do not say the size of your network, but we were able to deploy over 400 APS during that time. Before that change, we were using Cisco fat 802.11b/g APs and Cisco Clean Access for NAC on wired & wireless. In 2008, we moved to Aruba wireless and Bradford Campus Manager NAC after looking at the offerings back then. This summer we are moving our wireless and wired network to 802.1X authentication using Aruba's ClearPass product. Although this can be a NAC solution, (formerly Avenda eTIPS), we are not using it in this way. ClearPass is our RADIUS server and also will let us register non-802.1X capable devices by mac address. We are using the syslog output of ClearPass to feed out Procera PacketLogic system, allowing us to manage the Internet bandwidth of our students by username. We found that Bradford's NAC solution would not scale well to the size of our environment. We now have over 1200 APs. We believe that we can probably avoid having a NAC solution. For wireless, we will use Aruba's flexible built-in firewall roles to restrict Student access to Staff areas. If that does not work as planned, our alternate plan is to use the ClearPass NAC solution. We will initially use CloudPath XpressConnect to provision user machines for 802.1X and do a one-time posture assessment. We plan to eventually move that to Aruba's ClearPass QuickConnect product. We have Cisco as our partner for many things (wired network, VoIP phones, VM servers), but we are very pleased with Aruba Networks as our partner for wireless and NAC-related offerings. In fact, we would have the same sales team who is devoted to the Education customers in this area. Here is a video about our deployment of IPTV on our wireless network. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGT8-JvHc0g Please let me know how we can help further. you are welcome to come and visit in person if you wish. Bruce Osborne Network Engineer IT Network Services (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY Training Champions for Christ since 1971 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
