In our experience this is a fairly good Pro/Con list, however we ended up purchasing Meraki and uninstalling our Aruba network for a couple reasons: 1) much easier to use is a huge understatement. No longer are we tied to the availability of a dedicated network specialist who invests weeks to understand all the ins and outs of tuning the controller. This has made our network much more 'transparent' to us. 2) significantly lower cost for increased coverage. 3) Meraki was responsive to our needs - Aruba was not. (Sorry, all the good folks at Aruba: perhaps you're more responsive to other customers. I'm just reporting our experience.) Meraki has made significant improvements in their software - I'm not aware of Aruba's recent improvement level, but the software was quite static when we had it, and ongoing problems were not addressed. 4) Reporting is quick, easy, covers the salient points, and can be automated to be sent by email to whomever is appropriate. Perhaps this can be done in Aruba: it never happened in our experience, perhaps because of point 1) above.
It is true that one loses a certain amount of detailed control and complex configuration options by going with the hosted controller. In our experience, this has rarely been a real loss in terms of functionality. John On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 12:45 PM, Ethan Sommer <[email protected]> wrote: > 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/. > ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
