I think I'll finally chime in here. We have around 350+ Aruba APs with 10 controllers. I've upgraded the AOS every other version for the past 2 years, ~ 12 upgrades. I've never had an upgrade go bad on all 10 controllers. I've only had 1 AP NIC failure in that time as well. We have APs that are mounted in some of the dorms on the wall even and those haven't been destroyed or stolen. We have APs that sit in a garage and machine shop and work fine. We are primarily a Cisco shop for the rest of our networking equipment, but switched from Cisco fat APs to the Aruba's 3 years ago.
Aruba releases software about once a month and it always has worked. I'm very glad we made the decision to go with Aruba based on the fact that I see people on this message board complaining that something doesn't work right with their cisco upgrade. Maybe more people have cisco than Aruba, I don't know. As for Meraki, the concept works in some cases, and I'm not sure what the educational costs are, but the cost of their APs as advertised and enterprise controller seems almost the same as Aruba. -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:wireless-...@listserv.educause.edu] On Behalf Of Jason S. Cash Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 8:32 AM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Aruba vs HP vs Meraki On Fri, 2 Apr 2010, Ethan Sommer wrote: > We are considering replacing our 200+ AP wireless infrastructure with a > controller based 802.11n system. > > I believe we have narrowed it down to Aruba, HP Procurve (we use HP switch > gear), and Meraki. > > I have two questions: > > 1. Are there any hidden costs we should watch out for with any of these > (particularly Aruba.) Will we hit major costs other than the up front cost > for the APs and the controllers? > 2. I know a lot of schools are very happily using Aruba, but I haven't heard > of any schools using HP and very few using Meraki. > Are there any schools who have gone with Aruba and regretted it? If so, why? > Are there any schools out there using HP Procurve (formerly Colubrius) or > Merkai? What do you think of them? Did you have any surprises after you > deployed? > > > Ethan > > -- > Ethan Sommer > Associate Director of Core Services > 507-933-7042 > somm...@gustavus.edu > > ********** > 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/.
