Sustainability

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Bluesocket vWLAN Cuts Costs and Reduces Your Carbon Footprint

The design and engineering behind the development of Bluesocket™ vWLAN™ addresses customer’s increasing concerns over the environmental impact of IT purchasing and operating decisions. The next generation vWLAN architecture delivers industry leading performance, minimizes carbon emissions and energy consumption, while continuing to provide the state-of-the-art wireless security for which Bluesocket is known. A reduced carbon footprint and ongoing energy savings are the result of a significant reduction in required hardware:

• Bluesocket’s engineers have redesigned their solution to push many functions to the 802.11n Access Points (APs). This solution is architected to allow a single controller to handle ten times (10X) the number of Access Points, from 150 up to 1500, dramatically improving scalability.

• By leveraging the newly ratified IEEE 802.11n wireless standard, the wireless coverage of Bluesocket’s award-winning APs has increased five times (5X), reducing power consumption of the APs as the radios consume less power when clients are connected at higher data rates.

• The reduction in required hardware translates into reduced CO₂ output by eliminating the manufacturing, shipping, installation, storage, maintenance, and end of life disposal for that hardware.

• Most importantly, Bluesocket’s highly efficient vWLAN design results in ongoing energy savings of up to 80% throughout the life of the product.

• Future Bluesocket innovations will continue to deliver increasingly virtual solutions which will decrease dependency on dedicated hardware and allow customers to run control management software on a variety of servers, blades, and hypervisor platforms.

The vastly improved scalability of Bluesocket’s vWLAN also contributes to sustainability and efficiency. As the number of wireless devices steadily increases, Bluesocket’s vWLAN makes it easy and efficient for their customers to scale their wireless networks. Customers can simply add additional APs and licenses to expand the footprint of their network and/or the number of users/devices supported.

As an industry leader and innovator in the secure wireless market, Bluesocket’s state-of-the-art products help its customers migrate traditionally wired applications to wireless platforms while maintaining wired quality of service and security. Across the board, organizations are finding that usage of their network increases substantially overall with the introduction of secure wireless access. vWLAN is easy to install, expand and reconfigure which provides customers with significantly more flexibility in managing their overall wired and wireless networks. This creates efficiency and cost savings by reducing the need for expensive time and energy consuming infrastructure changes as networking needs evolve.

Bluesocket Is an Industry Leader in Green Technology

As Bluesocket was developing its next generation 802.11n AP, we committed early on to the energy and cost efficient Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology. PoE provides a means to transmit electrical power, along with data, to remote devices such as vWLAN access points (APs) over an unmodified Ethernet network. One of the primary benefits of PoE is negating the need for AC power in the ceiling, thus simplifying and reducing the cost of wireless LAN installations. As the 802.11n WiFi standard was emerging, one of the challenges product vendors encountered was how to deliver “full feature” solutions within the existing 802.3af power standard. Bluesocket was the first wireless LAN (WLAN) vendor to deliver an enterprise-class MIMO Access Point in 2006. We have since been working diligently with customers and partners to further understand their needs for standards-based, enterprise-class, high throughput wireless solutions. Having deployed thousands of MIMO access points across a variety of markets, our extensive real-world experience has resulted in significant market-leading technology advancements.

Building on this technology leadership position, Bluesocket developed the BSAP-1800 802.11n Access Point. Among other feature-level advantages, the BSAP-1800 was the market’s first 802.11n Access Point able to support the 802.3af power standard and deliver full-feature performance with a single-port Power over Ethernet (PoE) solution. This first-to-market advantage provided a significant benefit to customers planning 802.11n deployments. Not only did customers leverage Bluesocket’s extensive high throughput/coverage solution best practices, but they did not have to make trade-offs between performance, security, and other critical wireless network functions.

How Driving Technology Delivers Energy Savings

It was important when designing 802.11n hardware to understand this power budget and select components that would allow the AP to meet these constraints including CPU type, amount of memory, radio module, etc. Along with hardware selection, software architecture was also important to consider. This dictated the functionality that would be handled by the AP and was an important factor in selecting an appropriate CPU.  The BSAP-1800 802.11n AP solution delivers more than enough power for our base platform to provide the necessary processing power to handle simultaneous 802.11a/n and 802.11b/g/n streams. To achieve this, Bluesocket selected the industry’s most power efficient hardware and chipset technology, allowing them to design a “power-sipping” 802.11n AP without having to limit the functionality of the units’ radio usage configuration or CPU speed.

• Customers can evaluate Bluesocket’s products using its online Virtual Controller, thereby avoiding shipping equipment and additional electricity usage.
• All employees receive a SIGG™ reusable water bottle to reduce waste
• Ongoing green initiatives are transitioning Bluesocket to a paperless workplace. 
  
• IT infrastructure enables employees to efficiently telecommute
• Bluesocket sponsors “Go Green” community activities:

• Family Rally for the Environment as part of 350 - International Day of Climate Action, October 24, 2009 - www.350.org
• 2008 Eco Film Festival in Beverly, MA - www.mangonetworks.com

According to a Carbon Disclosure Project www.cdproject.net report, 52% of S&P companies said they have prepared for the likelihood of future regulation by establishing emissions reduction targets.  On October 5, President Obama signed a new Executive Order on Federal Sustainability, which challenges all federal agencies to lead by example in energy and environmental performance. The Order gives them 90 days to set a 2020 greenhouse reduction goal and also sets targets for efficient, sustainable buildings, reduced petroleum use in vehicles, water efficiency, waste reduction, purchasing green technologies and products, and supporting sustainable communities. www.epa.gov/Sustainability