Jay, We picked ARUBA mostly because we know that Wi-Fi will definitely change with 802.11n, but we needed our dormitories covered NOW. Aruba provided the cheapest short term solution with their B/G only APs ($295 list). I presented this to our administration as "trashable solution" while waiting for next generation Wi-Fi! On the controller side, Aruba has an upgrade path to support 802.11n. For PoE, we got PowerDsine injectors, gig capable, in preparation for more capacity (it seems that 802.3af will be able to feed some of those 802.11n AP)
A few caveats with Aruba: -Their new 3.x code was released a little to soon to our opinion... -Do not plan to use APs in AP mode for Wireless Containment, you need dedicated Air Monitor for that (we discovered it later :( -Position APs on each floor, or the heat map will not show coverage on floors that do not have APs -Documentation could be improved, but their TAC provides what is missing in the Doc. Besides these few items, it works well. Philippe ---------------------------------- Philippe Hanset University of Tennessee, Knoxville Office of Information Technology Network Services 108 James D Hoskins Library 1400 Cumberland Ave Knoxville, TN 37996 Tel: 1-865-9746555 ---------------------------------- On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Jay Howell wrote: > I am in the process of evaluating vendors for a campus-wide rollout of > wireless. I have narrowed my choices down to Cisco and Aruba. We are > planning on creating three roles which are faculty/staff, student, and > guest.Each of these roles will have varying degrees of access to systems on > the network. Because of manpower issues we will be broadcasting the SSID and > using Novell's LDAP to authenticate to the system. We are not a Cisco shop > so there is no advantage either way as far as dropping into our existing > system. > > My question is are there any gotchas I might be missing with these two > vendors? From what I have seen, both systems seem to work nearly > identically. You can access the same information from each controller, and > both are self-healing when an AP goes out. Are there any support issues I > should be aware of? We plan on making our decision around the first of > November, so I look forward to any comments this group might have. > > -- > ********************************************************* > Jay Howell > Executive Director of Information Technology > Chowan University > Ph: 252-398-6361 > ********************************************************* > > ********** > 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/.
