Which to keep - Aruba or Ruckus?

Good Afternoon,

I'm just after a little bit of advice to be honest, In my new job the previous network manager put in an Aruba Controller with 12 access points, and the network manager before that had put in a Ruckus system with 25 access points.

Having now reconfigured and set both up from scratch, I feel it's time to sell one system and put our money into a single brand - but which one?

I have:

Ruckus: Zone Director 3000, 25 x Zoneflex 7962

Aruba: 3200XM Controller, 12 x 105 AP's

I notice that the Aruba Controller only has a licence for 16 AP's - is this the same on the Ruckus?


Thanks in advance, Ben

Ruckus a will be 25, 50 or 100 licence. It will say in the Dashboard on the ZD.

7962 Are superb AP's (dual band, 19-element smart antenna) surely they're giving a fair amount of coverage between 25 units?

Sadly I can't vouch for the Aruba kit so I may be biased (reaches for Toms Hardware report)

Joe

The Ruckus APs that you have are far superior to the little 105s. There are bigger Aruba APs floating around but investment wise you already have a larger investment in the Ruckus stuff and a smaller investment requirement to bring up the whole site to it. Given the way the Ruckus handles traffic it may well be better for a larger site/larger traffic throughput.

In your situation I'd probably go with Ruckus stuff.

We've had Ruckus gear fail on us miserably. Really strange inexplicable login problems.

On a lark we swapped out the Ruckus 7962 for a Cisco 3502i and the issues disappeared. We're still scratching our heads as to why. Same authentication/encryption model, same SSID even.

In my years I have never had a ruckus issue save for a minor firmware issue which was resolved when the next firmware update was rolled out. The AP's you have for Ruckus are far superior to the Aruba ones, so speak with a supplier, trade in the aruba kit and see if you can get a deal on perhaps upgrading the points or something along the lines.

Another tick here for Ruckus over Aruba.

We had to buy an additional ARUBA controller because the original one supplied only supported 16 AP's when we needed more.

Using less AP's with Ruckus and have overcome problem areas where the Aruba wireless had issues.

Support for the Ruckus has being good and have not had any major issues so far, setup was painless. Kept original SSID but now have 'N' capability on supporting devices, change over was seemless, doubt if our users noticed the different AP's even.

Thanks for confirming my thoughts on the matter - if anything the Ruckus AP's are over provisioned in one area of the school and could be spread out more.

The Ruckus kit is still in support (the Aruba stuff is at the end of it's support). Keep an eye out for my sale of the aruba kit!

I have a feeling the Ruckus kit is more recent that the aruba.

I also wonder why your employer goes through so many network managers! Good luck!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dragon

I also wonder why your employer goes through so many network managers! Good luck!

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I just think that the last one wasn't up to the job (The one before was here for 4 years+).

My general feeling is that in the last 2 years lots of questionable decisions have been made, and money wasted.

Refurbed PC's at £280 anyone? - I can buy new for £310 with 3 year warranties.

The other issue was funding - I've made a 5 year plan to show the cost of replacing existing kit, something that's never been done before here, and been given a 15% rise in my 'maintenance' budget.