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Sunnyvale, CA, January 26, 2011 - Tennis Australia has expanded its secure mobile wireless network from Aruba in order to meet the demand for secure, flexible and scalable network access at its event sites.

With network demand at events such as the Australian Open being 100 times that of normal business traffic, Tennis Australia needed a solution that was easily scalable, manageable and secure. The increasing use of technology by staff, players, media and the public alike, and the variety of devices connecting to the network, could not be supported by its existing network. Specifically, the prevalence of smartphones and tablets, which constantly demand access to the network, was pushing the existing system to breaking point.

Dr. Chris Yates, Tennis Australia CTO, said, "New mobile applications, some of which we have developed, will allow this year's attendees and participants to check the status of matches happening in other arenas, find out what's on next and locate various facilities.

"Added to this, we have players, physiotherapists, Tennis Australia staff members and hundreds of members of the press all wanting access to a secure wireless network in order to conduct their daily business."

Dominic Orr, Chief Executive Officer of Aruba Networks, said, "Tennis Australia worked with Aruba to implement a secure, flexible and scalable network that also has situational awareness capabilities to allow the network to be effectively managed on busy tournament days.

"This means they can predict where the highest demand for network access will be and when, with a high degree of accuracy, and adapt the network to meet the need."

Tennis Australia now has a solution which can not only scale quickly and easily to cope with the peaks of event demand, but which will also enable the organisation to maintain this structure for future increases in peak traffic.

"There were three advantages to choosing Aruba," said Yates. "The strength of its Policy Enforcement Firewall (PEF) module enables one wireless network to effectively serve all of its user populations by means of identity-based controls.

"Secondly, interoperability is critical. We wanted to be able to use best-of-breed vendors in specific areas, and Aruba really takes a vendor-agnostic approach to integration. We could see that we wouldn't have trouble getting our various devices to work together.

"Thirdly, the real-time monitoring and analysis and historical data provided by the AirWave Wireless Management Suite enables us to see whether anything is going wrong and the locations of our peak areas of demand."

The Tennis Australia head office has deployed Aruba's 802.11n AP-105 access points (APs) throughout its facilities. In addition, Tennis Australia has regional offices located throughout the country, and these are now connected to the head office using the Aruba Virtual Branch Network (VBN).

Each remote office is equipped with inexpensive Aruba Remote Access Points (RAPs) or 600 series Mobility Controllers, which provide secure, authenticated remote access to Tennis Australia's data centre. Aruba Mobility Controllers in the data centre handle all VBN-related configuration, management and security tasks, minimising the need for IT resources at regional offices and simplifying network installation.

Yates said, "Everything we do has to scale for the Australian Open. I never want to be in a position where I have to go to my CEO and say, 'I didn't plan for this.'"