We tried out Meraki, and wound up going with Aruba.
Meraki Pros:
* MUCH easier to use.
* Possibly better coverage?
* The Aruba 105 ceiling mount design is really annoying. With meraki you
can just hang them on the wall with screws.
* Their techs (once you convince them you actually have a problem) can
go into your system and diagnose and fix the problem for you.
* There is no controller to purchase, so the cost scales linearly with
the number of APs. (the 65th ap isn't $10k)
Meraki Cons:
* We saw about a 40-50% increase in throughput using Aruba close to the
access points. (I could transfer about 11MBytes/second over 5Ghz N with
Meraki vs 19MBytes/second with Aruba.)
* We found it a bit creepy that their techs could do packet captures of
our network.
* The user interface is so simple it often hides parameters we'd like to
be able to tweek (or at least try tweeking.) For example, their sales
people said it only did 802.11G on the 2.4ghz band, but it actually did
802.11N. We wanted to try turning it to 802.11G only and see if what the
sales guy said about 802.11G and 802.11N interoperating was true, but
there isn't a way to do that. I suspect that having N turned on was the
better setting, but being who I am, I wanted to test it.
* Each AP is more expensive than an Aruba AP-105. Depending on how your
budgets work, it might actually be easier to have a big up front cost
and lower incremental costs.
* The ability to tunnel the traffic back to our server room and deal
with the VLANs there was a handy Aruba feature. With Meraki, you have to
tag the VLANs all the way out to the AP.
Ethan
On 08/11/2010 11:19 AM, Marcelo Lew wrote:
I was wondering if somebody on the list is using (or considered) using the
Meraki System?
Marcelo Lew
Wireless Enterprise Administrator
University Technology Services
University of Denver
Desk: (303) 871-6523
Cell: (303) 669-4217
Fax: (303) 871-5900
Email: [email protected]
**********
Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group
discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
--
Ethan Sommer
Associate Director of Core Services
Gustavus Technology Services
[email protected]
507-933-7042
**********
Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group
discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
