This morning at InterOp 2009 I spent a good deal of time at the HP booth listening to several of their presentation of various products. A very cool product I saw due out in June is an 'appliance' that plugs into existing network wall jacks using P.O.E. and acts as a managed 5 port switch and an access point. This could prove to be a wonderful solution for those pesky dead spots in our wireless network. The only catch is that it requires HP's new wireless controller to run it.

I also talked with some people at Riverbed about their Steelhead appliance that optimizes WAN traffic through more than just caching. It uses some very cool bit level optimization stuff that is way cool. We are needing a solution to 'speed up' a wireless point-to-point between our Middles School and the rest of the network. Right now it is agonizingly slow.Some improvement will come when we install a new point-to-pointe this summer, but if we are ever going to go 1-to-1 in that building, we are going to need to optimize that traffic as much as we can. An appliance such as this would do the trick.