We have covered several buildings on campus with Xirrus arrays. Their
strong point is dense areas. You can buy the arrays in 4, 8 and 16
radio increments. Each radio can do A/N OR B/G/N but not both . In
each array, one of the radios is usually used for rogue
detection/suppression and wireless management but can also be used as a
standard radio. Both the GUI and the command line are easy to use and
understand. Xirrus speaks CDP so if you are a Cisco shop, that's a
bonus. Their support staff are quick to help and they are adding
features daily. Originally we purchased the XS4's to save money but it
has quickly become apparent that the XN8's are where we will be going.
The XN8s have a larger coverage area and allow us to do full ABGN.
Since our campus has traditionally been a BG only shop, getting our
students to AN won't happen quickly and we need to be backwards
compatible for some time.
Likes/dislikes: I love the fact that they are growing so quickly and
adding new features on a daily basis. This is also a dislike though in
the fact that the management server software is having a hard time
keeping up. We have run into many bugs, like memory leaks and web
management troubles. But, as soon as we report them, we generally have
a fix or a work-around within a day or so and I write this off to the
fact that they are growing so rapidly and expanding their feature base.
We like to jump on the latest and greatest code release to gain access
to the new features so a different person who is not so eager might not
see the same problems we do. A personal dislike of mine is that my base
array is 4 radios, even if I only need 1 to accomplish a task. Their
technical support staff is by far one of the best I've dealt with to
date. If you have already invested in POE, you will still have to
purchase additional equipment to run the Xirrus APs because as I said
earlier, you are actually running 4, 8 or 16 radios in every unit and no
switch to date can push that kind of power.
Overall, I am happy with our Xirrus arrays and we plan to continue
rolling them out on our campus.
Tufts, Mark wrote:
Anyone have experience with Xirrus Wi-Fi Arrays either good or bad.
We are in the process of evaluating our wireless options for next year.
Mark Tufts
Director of Technology Services
Stonehill College
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