Meru VS Ruckus

[TheRobins]

Meru were at the EduGeek EDIT conference talking about AC and said almost exactly that...

 

We've had various issues with channels interfering with each other on our HP wireless system that we've had for a few years, so the single cell feature of Meru is definitely something I'm going to try to opt for when we need to replace them...

 

I was interested in the Ruckus Video on AC, Bill Kish on 802.11ac | Ruckus Wireless, Inc.

 

I'm sure I'm not miss reading his message, he doesn't seem very excited and seems to suggest its for high density areas such as conference rooms and stadia. No mention of education at all. Im not sold on AC to be honest.

[RichCowell]

No I'm not sure about AC yet, I was only confirming the quoted post about that... if you're not looking at BYOD in the next few years you may be okay without it... but it sounds like AC will future proof it more... depends what budget's available I guess...

[snagrat]

11ac Wave 1 doesn't add much for education really.

 

Wave 2 will add MU-MIMO which will be a massive improvement. That's still probably a year off being release.

 

I don't think many vendors are too bothered about 11ac now but obviously have to release products to keep up with the game.

[seawolf]

I wouldn't touch the Meru gear. The marketing is great, but performance in the real world leaves a lot to be desired.

 

Meru: Courthouse wireless network works 'perfectly' | Amarillo Globe-News

 

I would only consider three WiFi systems myself, in order of preference: Ruckus, Aerohive, or Ubiquity. If you don't have a lot of money, Ubiquity is a good option. If you have the money, go with Ruckus and never look back.

 

Why Your Wi-Fi Sucks And How It Can Be Helped, Part 2 - Welcome To The Wi-Fi Cage Match

[ass17]

Meru would have cost us £115,000 but we went ruckus for £75,000. 95 APs, two controllers, 15 HP 2920 switches, 5 year premium support.

 

No issues as yet, been in for the last year now.

[featured_spectre]

Very very good, I like the format, If only I had the time to do such a test I would try it. Although 5 years old that report is probably still a true representation of current standards

 

Well I know Xirrus and Aruba have only gotten better since, so they may be worth looking into. I believe @CPTLD may well supply Ruckus and Xirrus.

[mrnoisy]

Meru has been rubbish for us, and due to third party installation and purchase it's never been right since it went in. It probably works really well if meru come and install it, no one seems to know how to set it up correctly. 130 Ap's 600 clients.

[psydii]

That's a lot of APs.

 

How many rooms?

What's your average client density?

What are you client devices trying to do?

[mrnoisy]

That's a lot of APs.

 

How many rooms?

What's your average client density?

What are you client devices trying to do?

 

We have total coverage on site, 1 ap in each room, then communal areas and external.

Normally 30 laptops per classroom when in use usually around 400-500 clients at peak times, this does also include around 150 iPads

Clients usually aren't doing anything too taxing just logging in, open network document and edit / save.

I'm sure it works really well if setup correctly, I think the problem is that no one knows how to and presume that it's set up like a traditional wifi which meru is clearly not !

Edited June 15, 2014 by mrnoisy

[psydii]

Quick tips (you may have tried all this already):

 

Break the wireless clients down into separate vlan groups/essids. For a broadcast medium you don't want more than 60-120 devices on a broadcast domain. So for example have the science dept have a dedicated ssid for student devices, the humanities department another, while presenting site wide ssid for guests and staff, with each ssid mapping back to its own vlan.

 

Make sure multicast and UDP broadcast are disabled.

 

Make sure the firmware is up to date.

 

Disable support for 802.11b by requiring aes-ccmp.

 

Make sure laptop firmware and drivers are up to date.

 

Make sure you have the latest networking etc hotfixes from Microsoft (unless you are running 8.x don't rely on windows update for them)

 

Finally you may find improvement by disabling every-other wireless AP. It depends on many things but generally a rule of thumb is 1/2 an dual radio AP per classroom. You might want to try it out by disabling a few 2.5ghz radios.

[mrnoisy]

Thanks for the info, we've done most of the suggestions apart from turning some of the APs off, we are already vlaned but maybe not as far as you have suggested ( third party actually wanted us to reduce our current SSIDs and vlans).

I think our main issues is the third party ( who shall not be named but I bet you can all guess who it is ) and their reluctance to simply call meru and say we put all this kit in, it doesn't work and we don't know how to fix it.

Us lowly technicians could have probably sorted this months ago but due to said third party are not allowed to resolve the issue. And to be perfectly honest we don't get paid enough to be wifi jedi's :-)

[psydii]

However, if you become a wifi Jedi you can go and get paid enough

 

The third party is correct you do want to minimise the number of essids per radio/wireless broadcast domain. I was suggesting zoning essids and VLANs to reduce the number of machines on the layer 2 broadcast domain.

 

Forgot to mention, dual band and 40mhz channels made a huge difference too, assuming your clients support it.

 

Reading between the lines, if that third party had put in a ruckus network, you'd be having problems. Are you allowed to touch it, or do you have to wait for the regional consultant to do it?

Edited June 15, 2014 by psydii

[mrnoisy]

We where told to leave it alone which is most frustrating as we where making progress, still 9 month old wifi solution not working isn't so bad, it's not as if it's effecting education or our ability to deliver a service ;-)

[mrnoisy]

Anyway apologies for high jacking this post "my bad"

[seawolf]

Meru has been rubbish for us, and due to third party installation and purchase it's never been right since it went in. It probably works really well if meru come and install it, no one seems to know how to set it up correctly. 130 Ap's 600 clients.

 

130 APs for 600 clients is outrageous(ly expensive). We use 25 Ruckus APs with 350 clients and it works very nicely with no dead spots. If we tripled the number of APs and added 250 extra clients to take us up to 600 we would still have almost half the APs and even less clients per AP than we do now.

 

It is not surprising that it takes so many Meru APs to provide the coverage required though - because that's exactly what their wireless architecture demands. The whole "single cell" design of Meru APs has not been widely used because it doesn't work very well in the real world and doesn't scale. The only way Meru can handle high-density is to switch to multi-channel or to add more APs.

 

Meru Plays Catch-Up on WLAN Capabilities - Network Computing

 

Poking Holes - The Ruckus Room

 

The Ruckus Room: Wi-Fi

 

Oh, and just to be fair I should have added Xirrus to my list of WiFi vendors I would consider using. Xirrus is outstanding and probably better than anyone in very high-density environments, I just found them to be very expensive if your school buildings are spread out over a wide area with some of them being low density. I think they have tried to remedy this recently by making lower cost APs, but I still think Ruckus is the very best in most environments.

[ricki]

I mean we have lower signal areas like on corridors next to metal lockers when you walk past the client disconnects from one access point and takes a few seconds to connect to the next one

[ricki]

Just a thought you said you have ipads do they have ios7 if they do they are band width heavy and you may need to apply quality of service

[TheRobins]

Excellent feedback thanks people. I feel for mrnoisy, that must be so frustrating. I'm sure if setup correctly Meru will work extremely well in most environments. Sometimes you have to question how these "resellers" get contracts with the likes of Meru. Surely, as seen here their products word of mouth rating can sometimes hit 0 In certain circles because of bad setup and installation. Reading a couple of Post of some of the business IT forums quite a few post have summarised over all the features, its the controller and software that makes Ruckus stand out for people like ourselves. We don't have to pile mountains of man hours into constant management, fault finding and tweaking VLANs to try and make it work. I'm quite looking forward to getting the finished quotes in this week which looks like its going to leave a big decision to make. Admittedly were are no where near the scale of some of you out there, but still we need to right equipment that's going to do the job. With around 500 Pupils but currently 190 wireless classroom devices which is set to grow, the equipment is going to have some larger traffic at times with 1 or 2 small remote app's and some cloud based computing. Whilst I am also thankful for being given funding to upgrade our core and edge switching as well, as in its current state I am not sure the wireless would have a fair shot at being successful

[Michael]

You are right and I feel its going to come down to price. However I don't really agree with the "unmanaged" solution. The current system is un-managed and is a nightmare. I have only been here for a short while and also am on my own so my time is very thin on the ground. Also with the layout of the building, certain access points currently can be seen by 5 - 6 others, so with using 40MHZ bandwitdh, you are going to suffer with heterodyne and interference. Then when you start looking at 3 ssid's and VLAN management it would become a handful to manage.

 

You're going to get that with a managed system too I'm afraid. Managed systems only make sense when the volume of WAPs is so large that managing channel selection would be done better at controller level, rather than manually set individually or each WAP set to auto, no matter what wireless standard you're using. That's essentially all a managed system does.

 

Even bog standard home routers will switch to the next available channel when the other channel is busy.

[njc235]

Tolly Report #214124 Meru Networks WLAN Performance vs. Aruba Networks & Cisco Systems - 802.11ac WLAN Systems: Meru Networks AP832i vs. Aruba Networks AP-225 and Cisco Systems Aironet 3702i

 

Here's a new report on the subject which may assist some buyers.

[jtotheb]

There is an "issue" with Meru which all ruckus re-sellers seem to push, that all traffic has to pass through the controller.

 

Unless you've gone for a controller that's under-specced for the situation then that shouldn't be an issue. Cisco still tunnel back to the controller (unless they've changed things very recently), and as others have said you can run it in bridged mode too.

 

We found that Ruckus gear was far more forgiving with certain wnics in the 2.4ghz band when we ran head to heads. Unless you're planning on replacing a load of clients at the same time always test the gear with the clients you expect to be running with the system (and a range of randoms too if at all possible). E.g. if you have 500 of laptop model X that aren't going to be replaced for another 4 years get the ones that work best with those.

Edited June 16, 2014 by jtotheb
Typo

[psydii]

Ruckus vs the World.

Will Wave 2 of 802.11ac minimize Ruckus Wireless' advantage? | Network World

[wotnowires]

Mr Noisy,

 

Would you mind sharing your contact information with me via PM? I have dropped you a message, and would be keen to work with you to get to the bottom of your issues.

[wotnowires]

Hi all,

 

On the subject of 11ac, it is interesting that some wireless vendors are playing down 802.11ac and its benefits in 'Wave 1'. Generally, this is because the benefit of 11ac at this point comes from 80MHz wide channels, and multi-channel architectures have issues deploying with the wider channel widths.

 

Consider a vendor recommending 40MHz channel width vs an 802.11n solution:

 

1x1:1 11n @ 40Mhz = ~ 150Mbps

1x1:1 11ac @ 40Mhz = ~ 200Mbps

 

Multiply this up as the spatial streams increase, but you are only seeing a 30% uplift in moving to 11ac. Not a massive improvement when using 40MHz channels.

 

Now think about an 80MHz 802.11ac solution vs the same 11n solution:

 

1x1:1 11n @ 40MHz = ~ 150Mbps

1x1:1 11ac @ 80MHz = ~ 433Mbps

 

This is almost 300% of the performance of the 11n solution - a real benefit to 802.11ac today. Again, multiply up as you increase the number of spatial streams.

 

With regards to Meru and needing to pass the traffic through the controller, this isn't the case and hasn't been for many many years. There are many implementations of Meru utilising centralised (datacentre deployed) controllers with AP's in schools, these wouldn't be possible without the ability for the AP to bridge data locally. Each ESS Profile/SSID can be uniquely configured for distributed/bridged or tunnelled dataplane mode depending on requirement.

 

I guess my question is, if you are deploying WiFi today, why would you choose a 7 year old technology/standard? It's your call, but there are a few things I think are important to consider.

 

Firstly, although the standard was only ratified this year, on average I am seeing 7-12% of devices being 802.11ac in public events. Apple and Samsung are committed to 11ac as is evident in their latest hardware. The next generation of iPad and iPhone are expected to be sporting 11ac chipsets, and Samsung is now shipping MIMO 11ac chipsets in it's latest hardware. Dell, HP and Lenovo among others are now shipping 11ac chipsets in their newer laptops. Predictions I've seen from chip vendors such as Broadcom, are that they'll be shipping almost only 11ac chipsets by the end of the year.

 

Secondly, multiple vendors are reporting improved performance for legacy/802.11n client devices - of upto 40 percent depending on the client chipset. This offers a large increase in performance without the use of 802.11ac client chipsets.

 

Thirdly, 802.11ac is coming in with little or no price uplift over 11n (for enterprise vendors as a whole). With this in mind, I again find it hard to understand the choice of an older 11n technology.

 

It is entirely your choice as to which technology you choose, but I hope you take a good look at what is out there and listen to all sides of the story - my advice would be 11ac regardless of which vendor you choose, and don't forget that you are looking to support your clients for the coming 3-5 years (depending on your purchasing cycle) and that you need to consider what your aims are for teaching and learning in that time (including BYOD, which will certainly bring a plethora of 11ac devices to your network).

[mhowell]

Mr Noisy.

The Meru UK Team will always help you to try to get to the bottom of your issues, whatever they are. Please email [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] with the full details of all issues and who your reseller is

Our details are posted on other posts

Many thanks

MArk