Aruba vs Ubiquiti

[petben]

Hello, we currently have about 35 edge switches, moving from Netgear to Aruba slowly over the last few years . Now with just 10 or so to replace we are struggling to justify the £2200 Aruba model cost (6200M or 6200F) compared to a sub £1000 Ubiquiti switch that seems to have the features we need (VLAN, PoE, 10G uplinks, some 2.5G ports, cloud management etc) albeit a limited guarantee of 2 years and community support (and do they stack?). Obviously the Aruba's are rock solid, their command line management is fine, they have lifetime warranty and the thought of managing another new manufacturer and model is not really very attractive...

 

Are there any thoughts out there - Cost vs Reliability vs Support vs Features?

[pablo007]

I can't speak too much for switches as we only ever had a few although they were rock solid but Ubuiquiti gets an unfair rap, we had ubuquiti wifi here for years and it was brilliant, people kept telling me it was for the home and not enterprise but that by my experince is cobblers. We got lucky on the CTC scheme and it was replaced with Meraki, again rock solid but i'm pleased we were not footing the bill. Ubuiquiti is the right equipment at the right price mostly. From a management point of view its a doddle and all very intuitive, you can stack them via sfp+ ports but will still need to manage seperatley so not one single ip for a number of switches.

[Aprice]

At the end of the day the Ubiquiti's will work, that said personally our failure rate is quite high across multiple sites. It turned out they were using power supplies that had a bit of a reputation of going pop. I know this won't be everyone's experience and there's plenty of people that swear by them.

 

The Aruba switches and the old HP branded equivalent have been bullet proof and have a strong warranty. Aruba Central sucks in my opinion, we just use Zabbix for centralised monitoring and CLI for management. Works fine for us.

 

I personally think Unifi has a place in some environments, but it's usually a fair way down our list. Something like Cambium we'd probably tend to go for over Unifi and propper support is there, which I really want in a production environment, especially when working with paying customers.

Edited February 28, 2024 by Aprice

[ITGuyNW]

I'm looking at stuff at the moment and it seems to be either Aruba or Ruckus. There seems to be too many caveats for the price you pay with others at the moment.

[MatthewL]

I use a mix of both, both do the job but there are some quirks to the the Unifi kit, Aruba is my preferred and the warranty is the winner, had a few Aruba ones that have had some issues and they have been swapped out with no issues, with the lifetime warranty (well not infinite but defined on date period which I cannot recall off the top of my head) that wins hands down for me but depends what environment you are using them in.

[cdwyersandysecondary]

Hello, we currently have about 35 edge switches, moving from Netgear to Aruba slowly over the last few years . Now with just 10 or so to replace we are struggling to justify the £2200 Aruba model cost (6200M or 6200F) compared to a sub £1000 Ubiquiti switch that seems to have the features we need (VLAN, PoE, 10G uplinks, some 2.5G ports, cloud management etc) albeit a limited guarantee of 2 years and community support (and do they stack?). Obviously the Aruba's are rock solid, their command line management is fine, they have lifetime warranty and the thought of managing another new manufacturer and model is not really very attractive...

 

Are there any thoughts out there - Cost vs Reliability vs Support vs Features?

 

Hi mate, our entire infrastructure is powered off of ubiquiti switches, the interface within UniFi is great and really easy to navigate, configuring VLAN’s is a breeze and also; if you end up going down the ubiquiti route for cameras, AP’s etc etc, it’s all under one central pane of glass.

 

We do actually have a fleet of Aruba switches also that manage our Aruba wireless, we wanted ubiquiti wireless as per our other site, but the governing body denied it and put Aruba in.

 

They work absolutely fine, but the management of them is awful compared to UniFi. Absolutely all over the place, plus the cost and then yearly fee per device if you want them enrolled in Aruba central.

 

4 years and going strong with ubiquiti, don’t be put off by people who haven’t actually used them, saying they’re rubbish.

 

Look at their new RGB switches too, you can light the ports up different colours depending on the assigned VLAN’s on the port.

[FN-GM]

One is Enterprise grade, the other isn't. If you can survive without features such as VRRP, stacking, routing protocols etc go for it.

[synaesthesia]

From experience, Ubiquiti kit is great and can make all the difference in certain situations. For a primary school as an example, the difference in cost between them is large enough to warrant keeping a spare to hand just in case and replace all staff laptops. The early batches of PoE switches had dodgy power supplies which have now been fixed.

In a secondary however it's going to be down to risk management/mitigation and the big thing for Aruba (or other enterprise grade kit) is going to be lifetime warranties and support. You can middle ground for smaller schools with the likes of Cambium as has been mentioned, but it's really worth the greater investment especially with the features mentioned that provide redundancy, performance and peace of mind.

I still highly recommend not going near Aruba Central for switch management, even several years in it's just not even close to being suitable IMHO. Stick to Netedit for basic management and keep it "in house" and leave Central for it's original purpose, the wifi.

[localzuk]

We ran our trust on Unifi switches at the edge for about 8 years. Worked well. We had a couple of failures in that time. But we had spares on the shelf, so downtime was as long as it took us to swap out the unit and update the config.

 

We didn't have Unifi at the core though - we had HPE Procurve 5406R zl2 there, as Unifi still doesn't seem to do core switching properly. We had Unifi wifi in one school and Ruckus in the rest - and it all worked well.

 

All been replaced with Aruba now under the DfE's connect the classroom scheme. Extremely expensive setup, easily 5x the price of the Unifi equivalent. Works well though. All except Aruba Central, which is buggy, slow and weird.

[XiJ]

I find UniFi suffers from network snobs. Certainly for primary it’s absolutely the best solution in terms of value and performance. In my experience the older models could have failures of the PSU but even then our failure rate was low.

 

There maybe an argument for secondary that you need more.

 

Another huge issue for me, particular at primary is the licenses required. If I was looking at non UniFi, I’d look at Aruba Instant On.

[PotNoodleTech]

I certainly wouldnt look down on a school for running ubiquiti, I ran it here myself in the "really bad funding days" but the fact remains they are not the same tier as your cisco/etc so you shouldnt expect the same performance or reliability.

 

They're cheap, easy to set up, easy to configure, easy to replace and don't have any stupid licensing so it's a win win for schools on a tight budget.

 

The hardware reliability is the weak point I think - I had 5% death rate back in the day. As long as you budget in 5% of the project to buy spare switches/waps/etc you should be fine to be honest.

 

Saying that we're Aruba now thanks to LA funding and Aruba isn't any more reliable than Ubiquiti but it sure costs a lot more!

 

If someone said to me all your Aruba is going and you have to go back to ubiquiti I wouldnt cry myself to sleep or anything

[Primus]

We've got primary schools and secondary schools using Unifi for edge switching and WiFi - in total around 90 switches and over 330 APs.

 

We tend to use HPE/Aruba at the core.

 

Out of the 90 switches we've had one die within a week that was replaced under warranty and 1 AP die due to someone throwing a bucket of water over the floor above. Other than that no hardware failures though we do keep a small central stock of replacement equipment and given the cost of it all even having cold spares it's still much, much cheaper than brands like Aruba.

 

It's perfectly fine to analyse your requirements and say Unifi doesn't meet them - but you'd hope this was more than just "Unifi isn't enterprise and Aruba is". We run reasonably complicated networks with a number of vLANs, RADIUS in use etc and we've never once thought "I wish I'd gone with Aruba as Unifi can't do X" - but that's just us.

 

I do agree with a previous post that there's a level of network snobbery relating to Unifi.

 

We recently had Connect the Classroom DfE funding at one of our secondary schools and were able to get them to accept a derogation from their requirements - we've put in Enterprise 48 port PoE Unifi switches and Unifi U6 Enterprise APs - we couldn't be happier.

 

I'm also surprised at a comment relating to governors insisting on implementing Aruba - this is getting into the operational sphere and governors are meant to stay in the strategic.

 

It does also depend on your experience and expertise (and that of the wider team) - if you're happy implementing stuff yourself or you need assistance etc.

Edited February 29, 2024 by Primus

[Davit2005]

I find UniFi suffers from network snobs. Certainly for primary it’s absolutely the best solution in terms of value and performance. In my experience the older models could have failures of the PSU but even then our failure rate was low.

 

There maybe an argument for secondary that you need more.

 

Another huge issue for me, particular at primary is the licenses required. If I was looking at non UniFi, I’d look at Aruba Instant On.

 

I don't think there should be any case of snobbery, if the tech matches the need of the org then that should be the direction yep reliability plays into it but the price point of Unifi you can keep a few spares. And the single pane of glass is very handy.

 

Not all manufacturers have licenses though, not known Aruba to have any license's for switching, firmware for switches can be got by signing up to Aruba Support Portal.

 

I do know for a fact that Unifi would not be suitable for us i.e. lack of logical stacking, limited layer 3 routing, layer 3 redundancy, etc. But I know in previous places I've worked certainly the Switching at access port level Unifi would of been sufficient, Unifi Wifi possibly too.

Edited February 29, 2024 by Davit2005

[5tu]

We ran our trust on Unifi switches at the edge for about 8 years. Worked well. We had a couple of failures in that time. But we had spares on the shelf, so downtime was as long as it took us to swap out the unit and update the config.

 

We didn't have Unifi at the core though - we had HPE Procurve 5406R zl2 there, as Unifi still doesn't seem to do core switching properly. We had Unifi wifi in one school and Ruckus in the rest - and it all worked well.

 

All been replaced with Aruba now under the DfE's connect the classroom scheme. Extremely expensive setup, easily 5x the price of the Unifi equivalent. Works well though. All except Aruba Central, which is buggy, slow and weird.

 

Out of interest @localzuk, what are you using for your core now?

[Primus]

I don't think there should be any case of snobbery, if the tech matches the need of the org then that should be the direction yep reliability plays into it but the price point of Unifi you can keep a few spares. And the single pane of glass is very handy.

 

Not all manufacturers have licenses though, not known Aruba to have any license's for switching, firmware for switches can be got by signing up to Aruba Support Portal.

 

I do know for a fact that Unifi would not be suitable for us i.e. lack of logical stacking, limited layer 3 routing, layer 3 redundancy, etc. But I know in previous places I've worked certainly the Switching at access port level Unifi would of been sufficient, Unifi Wifi possibly too.

 

In terms of stacking - it depends what you're trying to acheive, if say you have limited fibre uplinks to a remote location and stack the switches to make use of them you can do the same thing with Unifi by uplinking the switches with DAC cables. If it's for management then stacking isn't really relevant since you're going to manage them through the web UI.

 

Are you doing your L3 routing at the edge?

[Davit2005]

In terms of stacking - it depends what you're trying to acheive, if say you have limited fibre uplinks to a remote location and stack the switches to make use of them you can do the same thing with Unifi by uplinking the switches with DAC cables. If it's for management then stacking isn't really relevant since you're going to manage them through the web UI.

 

Are you doing your L3 routing at the edge?

 

We are running OSPF internally and yes we aim to push L3 closer to the edge. We have a large org and many subnets.

Edited February 29, 2024 by Davit2005

[Primus]

We are running OSPF internally and yes we aim to push L3 closer to the edge. We have a large org and many subnets.

 

Out of interest, what type/size is the organisation?

[Davit2005]

Not a school.

 

I did not mean to cause offence or start an argument by the point I made. We employ MSTP with multiple instances and VRRP as well as internal OSPF. We have a mesh core.

 

If Unifi suits then by all means use it.

Edited February 29, 2024 by Davit2005

[Primus]

Not a school.

 

I did not mean to cause offence or start an argument by the point I made. We employ MSTP with multiple instances and VRRP as well as internal OSPF. We have a mesh core.

 

If Unifi suits then by all means use it.

 

I didn't take offence but I was interested in your reasons for discounting Unifi and they make sense but without the context I wonder if they could have led others on here to think that Unifi wouldn't be suitable for their school.

[Davit2005]

I didn't take offence but I was interested in your reasons for discounting Unifi and they make sense but without the context I wonder if they could have led others on here to think that Unifi wouldn't be suitable for their school.

 

I thought I did mention that in the post I made :-)

[Primus]

I thought I did mention that in the post I made :-)

 

It was more we were talking about them in the context of a school and you gave reasons why they're not suitable for you but your post didn't make it clear that you don't work in a school.

[Davit2005]

It was more we were talking about them in the context of a school and you gave reasons why they're not suitable for you but your post didn't make it clear that you don't work in a school.

 

I did not see that as an important to mention as was simply an AAAA vs BBBB thread.

[Primus]

I did not see that as an important to mention as was simply an AAAA vs BBBB thread.

 

As can be seen from many posts on here, it's never as simple as AAAA vs BBBB and context is key.

 

If you're saying your requirements aren't met by Unifi that's fine but maybe clarifying that you don't work in a school would be beneficial.

[Davit2005]

As can be seen from many posts on here, it's never as simple as AAAA vs BBBB and context is key.

 

If you're saying your requirements aren't met by Unifi that's fine but maybe clarifying that you don't work in a school would be beneficial.

 

Without wanting to continue too far there was no mention on the OP about the scenario either. Yes when you are putting AAAA vs BBBB it is not always easy.

Edited February 29, 2024 by Davit2005

[Primus]

Without wanting to continue too far there was no mention on the OP about the scenario either. Yes when you are putting AAAA vs BBBB it is not always easy.

 

The forum is heavily weighted to discussion relating to implementing tech in schools...