Wireless Considerations

Figure I would do a brief recap of our wireless solution selection. We had 3 primary vendors, Cisco, Aruba, and Entrasys as finalist. Cisco was the encumbant and the eventual winner. Each had pieces we liked, and each had portions we didn't like.

Aruba -- far and away the best software and management pieces out of all the vendors. the ability to manage clients outshone cisco and entrasys greatly. Their AmigoPod appliance for access control was a game changer. The access points themselves were solid with an almost industry standard 3*3 MiMO. It seemed obvious to us that Aruba focused a lot of their work on the development of the client and administrator experience.

Cisco -- Ah, my love-hate relationship. Cisco's ability to develop some of the most powerful and industry leading technology such as the 3600 series access points put them clearly above their competitors on the hardware side. Clean air, 4 spatial streams all good things. Then their issues. Developing a good back-end management and-or user experience is secondary (and i'm being nice here). Cisco, from my experience, does not know how to develop management tools nor completely understand customer user requirements. Trying to figure out how to get MSE, ISE, and NCS to all play nicely and work well is ..a challenge. Luckily, we did hire an integrator to help deploy the solution and we are finding our way. I'll delve more into this as we go along.

Entrasys -- was very inexpensive. The ability to integrate policy for APs and entrasys switches was impressive. The management tools were ok. It wasn't like they were completely integrated, but they did all exist under a common "launcher". However, we did not have entrasys switches and this caused the solution to lose some luster. The ability to track over time wasn't quite as good as the two other competitors. We tend to get complaints after the frustration is built-up. For example, a campus will not tell us for -months- that they had wireless issues in hallway b on thursday until they tell a board member. So, we are left scrambling. Unfortunately, entrasys could not replay the wireless maps as well as cisco or aruba. Perusing a log file isn't enough nowadays.

Anyhow, basic coverage on what we saw and considered. There were others (not Meru) but did not make it to the finalist for a variety of reason.