When we initially deployed wireless campus-wide, we evaluated Aruba against BlueSocket; at the time, BlueSocket won out easily. We gave Cisco a shot a few years ago when we were looking to do a major upgrade/refresh (because we are an all-Cisco shop), but they blew the POC, and lost the project. We stayed with BlueSocket and moved to their new offering and haven't looked back. BlueSocket was absorbed several years ago by Adtran. Overall, we have been very pleased with the product line and performance. They are also quite affordable - relatively speaking. They have cloud and VMware controller options. The GUI is pleasant, and it's very user-friendly to manage. We have 530+ access points running in "flex-mode".
We've had few to no bugs. They've stepped up whenever needed. -- ______________________________ ______________________________ Fishel Erps, Sr. Network & Infrastructure Engineer School of Visual Arts 136 W 21st St., 8th Floor New York, NY, 10011 LL: 212-592-2416 E: fe...@sva.edu ______________________________ “Today I will do what others won't, so that tomorrow I can accomplish what others can’t” - Jerry Rice From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> on behalf of Stephen Belcher <steve.belc...@mail.wvu.edu> Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 11:48 To: <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why? Cisco shop here with around 5300 APs. We are looking to get away from Cisco because of bugs and poor support. I would be happy to go in more detail off-line. Our fist choice is Mist. They are doing some amazing things but the price is a premium and we may not be able to afford them. Our second choice was Extreme (we have one small site with Extreme wireless) but, we just found out yesterday that with the acquisition of AeroHive, all new wireless will be based on their AeroHive HiveManager cloud platform rebranded to ExtremeCloud IQ. We are doing a deeper technical dive for that platform to understand the new offering. That being said, does anyone use AeroHive in a large deployment? Maybe it’s just a problem with Wi-Fi in general… Steve From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> On Behalf Of Michael Davis Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:27 AM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why? While not an answer to your request, we are also starting to look into this possibility for the same reasons. While we only have about 500 515s deployed with WiFi6 extensions disabled, we haven't seen tickets to this extent but we also don't have any greenfield 515-only deployments. We will be looking at Mist, being a heavy Juniper shop, but also Cisco as some existing collaborations may lead to cost effective transitions.. On 1/9/20 11:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H wrote: 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 has been one thing after the other, and my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to solve bugs. Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up. The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train. We have them deployed in one of our IT buildings. Periodically, people that are connected to these APs in the 5G band will stop working. To the user, they are browsing a site, then it becomes unresponsive. If they are on their phone, they will disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell. Nothing makes an 802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve. Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead (but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band). We’ve been working on this problem with them for months. It always seems as though we have to prove there is a real issue. I’m fed up with it. We are a sophisticated shop. If we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a real problem. I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus. To Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around February). When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought back half of them. I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would be fixed by the time the 315s ran out. Not looking to be the case. So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away from Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon). There are other bugs I’m not even mentioning here. For those of you that made the switch to another vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted, what were your motivators, and were you happy with the overall results? Of course, this is a great opportunity to plug your vendor. As I see it, we have 3 choices…. Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped them for bugs), something from Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this makes sense), something from Juniper (Mist). Thanks, Ryan Turner Head of Networking The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill +1 919 445 0113 Office +1 919 274 7926 Mobile r...@unc.edu ********** 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 -- Mike Davis IT - University of Delaware - 302.831.8756 Newark, DE 19716 Email da...@udel.edu ********** 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 ********** 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 ********** 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
