New wifi, switching element

[Andycat]

We've received tender responses for new WiFi and related switching. One of these is for Cambium, one for TP Link Omada, alongside some Aruba and Meraki options, and while people on here have kindly shared experience with the Cambium WiFi element, has anyone used either's switching?

 

We're familiar with Aruba and Cisco stuff, we have a mix at the moment of old Cisco and a newish Aruba core.

 

The Aruba and Meraki options are coming out nearly twice as much, and obviously times are hard etc....

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Andy

[forkies]

Have you considered Unifi? Much cheaper and no ongoing high licensing costs.

I think there was a bulletin from NCSC recently about TP Link being compromised, but that might just be their routers.

We historically were Meraki way back, didn't think much of it. We had Aruba at core after upgrading from our old HP switching, but again, not much if any benefit over Unifi from the costs.

I cannot comment on Cambium as never seen it in use in any education environment near us. Most people were Aruba or Meraki but have switched to Unifi to meet budgets and still have all the features needed as an education establishment.

[Andycat]

 Thanks, but nobody offered Unifi so not an option.

[Davit2005]

4 hours ago, forkies said:

still have all the features needed as an education establishment.

There are educational establishments that require much more than those available features 🙂

 

I'd always say look at the features you need then go from there, no need to over spec but maybe look at possible further requirements.

 

Not all Cisco or Aruba need licensing, both offer various solutions depending on what you need.

 

 

Edited April 15 by Davit2005

[forkies]

4 hours ago, Andycat said:

 Thanks, but nobody offered Unifi so not an option.

Not surprised as they don't make enough mark up on it, and no ongoing income for license free. When you can self install as well.

 

41 minutes ago, Davit2005 said:

There are educational establishments that require much more than those available features 🙂

 

I'd always say look at the features you need then go from there, no need to over spec but maybe look at possible further requirements.

 

Not all Cisco or Aruba need licensing, both offer various solutions depending on what you need.

 

 

True, but if they need any features not offered by Unifi then they likely have the budget to match the needs. I cannot see a academy/state secondary or primary school needing anything Unifi doesn't offer right now.

[Davit2005]

17 hours ago, forkies said:

Not surprised as they don't make enough mark up on it, and no ongoing income for license free. When you can self install as well.

 

True, but if they need any features not offered by Unifi then they likely have the budget to match the needs. I cannot see a academy/state secondary or primary school needing anything Unifi doesn't offer right now.

Jus trying to point out that educational Establishments includes a broad field, some of those are doing critical research and even providing health services and holding patient records 🙂

 

Yep the budget is sometimes there but does not mean it is not fought for any less to get funding for infrastructure projects 🙂

Edited April 16 by Davit2005

[nicholab]

I used to be a fan of HP ProCurve kit, I have used Netgear, Cisco and TP-link.  I would not use Netgear I did not find the management to be very good.  I currently run Unifi Network and I like the management of it if you can get a Unifi hardware that runs the controller that makes life easier.  Unifi has a cloud management option as well so it can be controlled remotely even if you don't know the WAN IP. 

[FN-GM]

17 hours ago, forkies said:

I cannot see a academy/state secondary or primary school needing anything Unifi doesn't offer right now.

 

Stacking is a basic feature I have seen in schools for just short of 20 years.

[nicholab]

What is stacking?  A high-speed internconnect that also merges the switch into one management interface?  Is that needed if you can connect 2x25Gbit DAC's and the management takes place in another place?

[forkies]

13 minutes ago, FN-GM said:

 

Stacking is a basic feature I have seen in schools for just short of 20 years.

For a school, usually a MC-LAG and Unifi's centralised management would cater for the features of a stack. Although stacking is coming soon to Unifi if you are running extremely high bandwidth for example and need that 40Gb+ backplane. Although on other threads people are saying bandwidth isnt peaking much over 2Gb, but I appreciate some school somewhere may have 20GB+ consistent bandwidth to manage.

[DalekSec]

I'd argue if stacking is 100% needed in schools, should'nt be a deal breaker. Just beacuse you can't make 'like for like' changes with your old kit doesnt mean it's any worse. 

 

I've just built our new site with the UniFI enterprise kit, it has a 100Gb redudant backbone. Pretty much followed this: 

 

https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/30297446527767-An-Overview-of-High-Availability-in-UniFi 

[Davit2005]

The ability of stacking of switches is to remove a single point of failure certainly in large groups of switches. But again the need depending on org, SLA, etc.

 

To an extent some resilience can be made with the use of spanning tree but that does not balance the load but is a viable solution 🙂

 

We employ at the moment OSPF internally with 4 cores in a mesh, 3 instances of spanning tree so are getting some load balancing. New project I don't think will be stacked core but will be stacked edge 🙂

Edited April 16 by Davit2005

[DalekSec]

5 minutes ago, Davit2005 said:

The ability of stacking of switches is to remove a single point of failure certainly in large groups of switches. But again the need depending on org, SLA, etc.

 

To an extent some resilience can be made with the use of spanning tree but that does not balance the load but is a viable solution.

 

Following the above unifi guide, it still removes the single point of failure. 

[Davit2005]

23 minutes ago, DalekSec said:

 

Follow the above unifi guide, it still removes the single point of failure. 

Where you have 4-8 switches in one space I don't see how that is going to work without been a nightmare cable/configuration job compared to a stack of 4-8 switches, top and bottom switches connected to uplinked switches 🙂

 

Especially in some cases where creating a stack is as simple as enabling stacking feature and then jus adding an extra switch with possibly one change on each switch for a port to make it a stacking port in the case of VSF. Usually simpler if you have dedicated stacking ports.

Edited April 16 by Davit2005

[DalekSec]

23 minutes ago, Davit2005 said:

Where you have 4-8 switches in one space I don't see how that is going to work without been a nightmare cable/configuration job compared to a stack of 4-8 switches, top and bottom switches connected to uplinked switches 🙂

 

Especially in some cases where creating a stack is as simple as enabling stacking feature and then jus adding an extra switch with possibly one change on each switch for a port to make it a stacking port in the case of VSF. Usually simpler if you have dedicated stacking ports.

 

understand, but giving the cost saving i'll deal with the excess cables,

 

Unifi's stacking switches are due to be released Q2 this year, so any week now

[nicholab]

I had Netgear stacking it was pretty much the same cable as the DAC on Unifi.  On a Cisco 2950 it was just an extra cable at the back that limited the positioning of the switch.  Cisco also had the stack going up and down at first, so not a Golden bullet.  The HP ProCurve 4108gl that a lot of us cut our teeth on had a backplane bandwidth of 18.3 Gbps.  Makes you think.

[psydii]

I've tried to keep things as simple as possible over the last decade or so. Previously we had non-stacking switches at the edge, patched together so no single failure would  take an entire comms room out. The problem was any single switch failure would cause a significant spanning tree event. By putting a stack at the top of each comms room rack (top switch to core, bottom of the stack to the next comms room around), and then hanging the the legacy switches off that stack with LACP Trunks network reliability improved massively. If we'd put in 24-core (rather than 12-core) OM3 between the comms rooms when we refurbed the building we could have had every switch with its own dedicated back-haul to the core,  the benefits of stacking (in a school environment) would have been somewhat redundant.

 

I have also seen entire stacks crash (so much for improved resiliency!) but these problems have always gone away over time with firmware updates.  Our core at top of rack stacks received their last updates *14 years* after initial installation. My concern for lower cost solutions is whether the product will be around/supported long enough to work through the bugs, and how difficult the sell to SLT/Governors will be that we need to replace everything again after only a few years, and that the new kit has to go through the pain of being new.

 

Honestly, if HP/Aruba said "give us 10K per year and well support your switches for ever until you stop paying", I'd be the first to sign up.

[Davit2005]

We have 6 stacks of 2930f's put in about 3 years back, total about 50 switches, 3 failures. 2540's have failed only slightly more, total 130 put in about 9 years back 5 failed, 40 2530's put in 9 years back cannot remember replacing one yet. 5 year warranty NBD replacement.

 

Upgraded stacks a few times pretty straight forward no issues with the stack as a whole.

 

Edited April 16 by Davit2005

[psydii]

...while the lifetime warranty on the 2920's we have has done some seriously heavy lifting.

[FN-GM]

14 hours ago, forkies said:

For a school, usually a MC-LAG and Unifi's centralised management would cater for the features of a stack. Although stacking is coming soon to Unifi if you are running extremely high bandwidth for example and need that 40Gb+ backplane. Although on other threads people are saying bandwidth isnt peaking much over 2Gb, but I appreciate some school somewhere may have 20GB+ consistent bandwidth to manage.

 

I would disagree. You seem to be looking at this from one angle only....

[msi_school]

21 hours ago, psydii said:

I have also seen entire stacks crash (so much for improved resiliency!) 

 

I have twice had a UPS fail and just stop providing power, every single point of failure will bite you at some point, until the increased complexity of your redundant set up gets you instead.

[forkies]

11 hours ago, FN-GM said:

 

I would disagree. You seem to be looking at this from one angle only....

I am open to opinion. Just my opinion is that for a school, the costs of hardware is vastly over priced and many features the schools don't need, or have the sufficient manpower to maintain. When Unifi release their stacking capability shortly, it would be interesting to see the price difference to other providers. Again, I personally think that for a school, where 5 minutes of downtime wont mean the end of the world, or loss of significant earnings in a commercial sales company, or emergency services, the features provided (i.e. MC-LAGS etc.) are more than sufficient and meet the gov standards for schools.

[RobFuller]

@Andycat  I’m currently running around 90 Cambium APs and nearly 70 Cambium cnMatrix switches, if you have any questions or what to chat let me know.

 

MG‑LAG is coming to the cnMatrix 3000 series, which is good news if you’ve specced these at aggregation, got shown this at BETT.

That said, at the edge I don’t personally feel it’s essential. We run dual fibre links back to our core, which is split across two locations on our site, and simply rely on STP to handle path selection. If a switch fails, the alternate route comes up almost instantly and everything just carries on, no fancy stacking to achieve resilience.

 

I’ve been really impressed with Wi‑Fi 7 performance. I notice very little difference between a hard‑wired connection and a 6 GHz wireless link, with both achieving multi‑gig throughput.

[Andycat]

Thanks @RobFuller, good to hear. Yes, they've specced EX3025 and 3030 switches, and they are just edge switches, core is recent Aruba.

[RobFuller]

Nice, this is a new switch so wasn't around when we did our refresh however I do have one which was free as part of a beta test 😏

The fans can be a little nosy would be my only complaint, some locations this was an issue however swapping in some Noctua fans made them silent which Cambium didn't seem to fussed about us doing. 👍