I attended Networking Field Day 24… but with my Wireless LAN hat on!
Mist is one of the great new up-and-coming vendors in the Wireless LAN space who has been purchased by Juniper Networks. I personally don’t have much experience with Juniper’s data center or even switch fabric products – but have enjoyed learning and using Mist WLANs with customers, and in our offices.
A while ago, I had a chance to virtually sit at the feet of the great Peter Mackenzie with a new course he developed for Juniper/Mist. The course is called Juniper Networks Certified Specialist Mist AI certification – or JNCIS-MistAI for short – yeah – a mouthful either way. I’ve taken a LOT of courses and certification exams over my 20 year career in IT.
This was easily the best course I’ve attended. And the certification exam was fair and targeted at the materials covered in the course materials. I can’t give it any better compliment.
There is also a pre-cursor course – albeit online only – and exam. This is called the Juniper Networks Certified Mist AI Associate, or JNCIA-MistAI for short. OK, not so short. And yes, these two monikers are only a single letter apart in their names… but way different in their content. The Associates level does have a small amount of Mist-centric content and questions – but it is mainly targeted at delivering underlying background fundamentals of RF, 802.11 and Wireless networking in general. Whereas the Specialist course is focused more on Mist solutions.
Both are well worth your time.
That said, let’s now move on to the content at #NFD24.
I’m going to focus on the presentations that are tied to Wireless LANs – they did talk about some other Juniper things, but I’m personally way more interested in the WLAN components.
Bob Friday and Sudheer Matta are both well-known in our community for both their experience and high-energy discussions. And they did not disappoint at #NFD24!
First – I really enjoy the aesthetics of their graphic design department and the consistency of their graphics used to describe their systems.
Rather than default to solutions that other vendors have chosen – that is, to use Sensors, or 3rd radios to listen in, or even just off-channel scanning, Mist has a much better approach, in my humble opinion, to use live real data from Access Points and now with real Wi-Fi clients to learn from the actual situation.
Note this single screen-shot from their presentation:
Tracking, in near-real-time information from client devices via an agent, and tied back with data from the access points as well.
This, coupled with the Mist version of Radio Resource Management that includes the effect of changes in Transmitter power or channel choices on actual clients to make changes only that improve client experience is what sets Mist apart from the crowded marketplace of “me-too” RRM systems
This is just a small smattering of the presentation; you can go watch it for yourself here
If you’d like more information on the Juniper Mist certification program, the links are here:
Older Mist Master Certifications and Training can be found on the Mist Dashboard: https://courses.mist.com/dashboard
The new Juniper / Mist training here:
Mist 4-day Training:
https://learningportal.juniper.net/juniper/user_activity_info.aspx?id=11460
Mist AI Certification track details:
https://www.juniper.net/us/en/training/certification/certification-tracks/mistai?tab=jncis-mistai
Mist API Class:
https://api-class.mist.com
