Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Jeffrey Mesch]

I really think this is the key factor in this...how the vendor (and 
reseller if applicable) responds and the relationship overall.


We're a tiny school, just 500 students.

For +5 years we've had a great relationship with arguably one of 
HP/Aruba's top engineers in the state. General Motors headquarters is on 
his list of responsibilities. Despite being so small he'd give us as 
much time as he gave GM.


Despite the relationship, we went with Mist for wireless because of 
their innovation and problems with a couple Aruba resellers.


We hit some snags with Mist, and now both the local reseller and 
Mist/Juniper engineers won't give us the time of day. Level 1 support is 
good, but beyond that we've basically been on our own.


In hindsight I've wondered if our results may have been better had we 
stuck with Aruba because of the well-established relationship. In 
general we tend to have more success with vendors/resellers where 
there's a solid existing relationship.


+++Jeff


On 1/9/20 1:42 PM, Patrick McEvilly wrote:
I agree with you, all vendors will have bugs and it’s how the vendor 
responds is what matters.  Our experience on how Aruba handles them has 
been nothing but positive.


We have found our fair share of bugs on Aruba and yes some of them 
probably should not have been found by customers.  The support/response 
from Aruba has always been top notch.  Usually within 24 hours of 
reporting the bug the issue has been identified and the fix is in the 
next release.  We do allow our SE remote access into our infrastructure 
which helps with not draining our own resources while working to resolve 
these problems. Our Aruba SE takes care of reporting the bugs and gets 
them prioritized for us so for the most part we are hands off when 
dealing with Aruba support.


*From: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of "Turner, Ryan H" 

*Reply-To: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 


*Date: *Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 12:01 PM
*To: *"WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 


*Subject: *Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

 From my standpoint, it really isn’t about having bugs. They will all 
have them.  Its how the vendor handles the request when it comes in.


Extreme is a very good example of this.  While we have bugs, I know I 
can escalate it all the way to the C level of executives if I don’t 
think an issue is getting handled quickly.  If I tell them a bug is 
critically important, then very soon we are on the call with a 10+ 
developers/coders/executives working to fix the problem.  While not 
everything has been perfect, I know that if I tell Extreme something is 
important, things get resolved.  I feel as though I’ve had to complain 
so much in the past two years over issues that I’ve become chicken 
little.  It should be obvious to an executive team monitoring an account 
that when you have significant bugs exceed 2-3 months, the wagons need 
to be circles.  It doesn’t seem to be automatic.


So, in short, its not always the existence of bugs that is the problem.  
It is the company’s response to the problem.


Ryan

*From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 *On Behalf Of *Jeffrey D. Sessler

*Sent:* Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:56 AM
*To:* WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
*Subject:* Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Our consortium had both Cisco and Aruba, and about 12-18 months ago the 
Aruba folks tossed in the towel and went Cisco. Various unresolvable 
problems with Aruba AP’s, including one that required a weekly reboot of 
a particular model.


As Lee mentions, the grass isn’t always greener, so expect that you’re 
going to run into issues with any vendor. As such, it’s going to come 
down to support/resolution and your relationship with the vendor. 
  Startups are great as they have a single product with a single 
code-train, so they tend to be pretty responsive at the start. Once they 
have a few years under their belt, and their code base starts to 
fragment, you’ll get to the same point you have with the big incumbents 
i.e. too many code bases to support effectively.


Jeff

*From: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
>

*Date: *Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 8:15 AM
*To: *WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU 
 
>

*Subject: *[WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 
access points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and 
downs, my frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point 
that I am considering making the enormous move to choose a different 
vendor.  The biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we 
just don’t consider appropriate to use in production.  It 

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Mist - Juniper Feedback

[Jeffrey Mesch]

Sacred Heart in Detroit is a Mist customer. We're a tiny school with 
just 40 AP's in a single building (academic, residential, conference 
center). Our building is 100 years old and has a significant amount of 
concrete and brick.


We deployed Mist in November but had to roll back to our old system 
(Ruckus) after 5 days.


We had a significant change in coverage (as in poor) when we went to 
Mist and may have found a couple other problems.


We're working with Mist/Juniper and our local reseller to figure out 
what the problems were and resolve them ASAP. I think our reseller may 
be the same as the University of Michigan -- Flint's.


+++Jeff



--
Jeff Mesch
I.T. Manager
Sacred Heart Major Seminary

e. mesch.jeff...@shms.edu
w. 313.883.8673

shms.edu
Heart. Mind. Ministry.

On 12/16/19 2:16 PM, Erik Taipalus wrote:
University of Michigan - Flint is currently beginning to deploy Mist 
wireless on campus. We've started with our residence halls as they tend 
to be the most challenging RF environments and will be a good test. I've 
copied our network architect on this so he can reach out with more 
details if he is able.


On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 1:08 PM Blake Brown > wrote:


Good morning,

MHCC is looking at alternatives for our current Wi-Fi solution and
one that has come up is Mist. Does anyone on the list have this
system currently deployed and willing to provide some feedback on it?

Thanks,
Blake Brown
503-491-6910
Infrastructure Manager




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--

Erik Taipalus

Lead Project Manager / Team Manager

Information Technology Services

University of Michigan - Flint

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Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community