I really think this is the key factor in this...how the vendor (and
reseller if applicable) responds and the relationship overall.
We're a tiny school, just 500 students.
For +5 years we've had a great relationship with arguably one of
HP/Aruba's top engineers in the state. General Motors headquarters is on
his list of responsibilities. Despite being so small he'd give us as
much time as he gave GM.
Despite the relationship, we went with Mist for wireless because of
their innovation and problems with a couple Aruba resellers.
We hit some snags with Mist, and now both the local reseller and
Mist/Juniper engineers won't give us the time of day. Level 1 support is
good, but beyond that we've basically been on our own.
In hindsight I've wondered if our results may have been better had we
stuck with Aruba because of the well-established relationship. In
general we tend to have more success with vendors/resellers where
there's a solid existing relationship.
+++Jeff
On 1/9/20 1:42 PM, Patrick McEvilly wrote:
I agree with you, all vendors will have bugs and it’s how the vendor
responds is what matters. Our experience on how Aruba handles them has
been nothing but positive.
We have found our fair share of bugs on Aruba and yes some of them
probably should not have been found by customers. The support/response
from Aruba has always been top notch. Usually within 24 hours of
reporting the bug the issue has been identified and the fix is in the
next release. We do allow our SE remote access into our infrastructure
which helps with not draining our own resources while working to resolve
these problems. Our Aruba SE takes care of reporting the bugs and gets
them prioritized for us so for the most part we are hands off when
dealing with Aruba support.
*From: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv
<[email protected]> on behalf of "Turner, Ryan H"
<[email protected]>
*Reply-To: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv
<[email protected]>
*Date: *Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 12:01 PM
*To: *"[email protected]"
<[email protected]>
*Subject: *Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
From my standpoint, it really isn’t about having bugs. They will all
have them. Its how the vendor handles the request when it comes in.
Extreme is a very good example of this. While we have bugs, I know I
can escalate it all the way to the C level of executives if I don’t
think an issue is getting handled quickly. If I tell them a bug is
critically important, then very soon we are on the call with a 10+
developers/coders/executives working to fix the problem. While not
everything has been perfect, I know that if I tell Extreme something is
important, things get resolved. I feel as though I’ve had to complain
so much in the past two years over issues that I’ve become chicken
little. It should be obvious to an executive team monitoring an account
that when you have significant bugs exceed 2-3 months, the wagons need
to be circles. It doesn’t seem to be automatic.
So, in short, its not always the existence of bugs that is the problem.
It is the company’s response to the problem.
Ryan
*From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv
<[email protected]> *On Behalf Of *Jeffrey D. Sessler
*Sent:* Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:56 AM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
Our consortium had both Cisco and Aruba, and about 12-18 months ago the
Aruba folks tossed in the towel and went Cisco. Various unresolvable
problems with Aruba AP’s, including one that required a weekly reboot of
a particular model.
As Lee mentions, the grass isn’t always greener, so expect that you’re
going to run into issues with any vendor. As such, it’s going to come
down to support/resolution and your relationship with the vendor.
Startups are great as they have a single product with a single
code-train, so they tend to be pretty responsive at the start. Once they
have a few years under their belt, and their code base starts to
fragment, you’ll get to the same point you have with the big incumbents
i.e. too many code bases to support effectively.
Jeff
*From: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*Date: *Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 8:15 AM
*To: *[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*Subject: *[WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
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
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
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