I cannot speak specifically to Cisco's newest wireless equipment. but when we spent almost 2 years evaluating wireless a few years ago, primarily comparing Cisco and Aruba, Aruba was the clear choice for this formerly all-Cisco shop.
The Aruba controller infrastructure allows you to manage the configuration of multiple controllers from a single master controller. We actually have a redundant master setup. When we tried Cisco's management appliance at that time, I could the manager would sometimes say a controller configuration was up-to-date when I knew it was not. Aruba controllers have a built-in stateful firewall allowing very good access control. Aruba's support was (and is) much better than the support we had with our old Cisco fat AP infrastructure. We had a requirement for multicast IPTV on wireless and Aruba engineering worked with us on a solution that has worked well for several years now. It is interesting that there are many threads on this user forum querying about different Cisco controller code versions. You do not see as many postings about #2 Aruba due to their reliability & support. Even with some very strong incentives from Cisco we chose Aruba and are glad we did. We are just completing a hardware refresh up to their new 7200 series controllers. We use Airwave primarily as a wireless monitoring tool. It was originally designed as a cross-platform monitoring tool. For the past year we have ClearPass as our RADIUS server for 802.1X and expect to add some of the new guest capabilities over the coming year. We also use the ClearPass API to register non-802.1x devices so they can mac-auth to the network while still tying them to a user. We use the syslog output of ClearPass to feed information to our bandwidth management system. The ClearPass information ties a username & ip address together so bandwidth can be managed per user rather than per ip address. Bruce Osborne Wireless Network Engineer IT Network Services (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY Training Champions for Christ since 1971 ________________________________ From: Linchuan Yang [linchuan.y...@concordia.ca] Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2013 11:53 AM Subject: Cisco VS. Aruba Dear All We are planning to upgrade our whole wireless network. Could you please comment based on your experience which one is better: 1. Cisco Prime Infrastructure VS. Aruba Airwave 2. Cisco ISE VS. Aruba ClearPass Thank you, and have a nice day. Yours, Linchuan Yang (Antony) Wireless Networking Analyst Network Assessment and Integration, IITS-Concordia University Tel: (514)848-2424 ext. 7664 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
