Aerohive Networks Review

• Very easy deployment
• Great radio performance
• Application signatures – very powerful L7 firewall
• Tools for troubleshooting of Wi-Fi clients

We implemented more advanced Visitors networks on our sites and also more strict security rules for bring your own device and other wireless access networks. That wasn't possible without L7 firewall on AP itself. Also before we didn't have central management for all APs at our organization – now we can change anything we want from within one place.

Aerohive configuration management can be little hard to understand for someone who has never worked with it. The initial configuration is easy but advanced tuning needs deeper knowledge of Wi-Fi technology and also about Aerohive management.

On the other hand – the support is very helpful and documentation is very large and contains almost everything that can be found at HIVE console.

One year and 6 months.

No. Deployment was smooth with any major problems

We had/have some problems with stability, but it’s not problem with Aerohive itself. We are covering manufacturing/industrial environment, which is emitting lots of interference on the 802.11 b/g/n band. Stability on this band is very poor due to the environment, but on 802.11 a/n band (because of more channels) stability is very good.

Scalability is not a problem at all. At some places we have “high density mesh” and L2 roaming along with automatic channel distribution is working very well.

Customer service is very helpful. Before deployment we were speaking with our regional customer service and then directly with Aerohive. Both gave us the necessary information for deployment and initial configuration.

Customer service is very helpful. I am using two different ways to solve the problems – one is through my regional contact (Aerohive reseller + support) and second is directly with Aerohive support. We submitted some cases and all were solved with an explanation of function or a bug fix in a new release.

We had “non central management” wireless solution before Aerohive. That was our primary goal for switch – to have central control over wireless connection at whole company and enforce different set of security policies.

Initial setup was straightforward – it’s very easy to deploy it. We had a pilot on one site, where all our needs were tested and then solution was deployed to the rest of company.

We deployed by “in-house company” team. Initial/tuning configuration was done by me and physical deployment was done by local IT support on remote sites.

Yes – we did evaluations of some other products.

We tested Cisco Meraki – Meraki is very good product, straightforward with configuration, but they don't provide central management which can be kept in-house, but only hosted on their cloud. We were not satisfied with it, because we want to keep all our info inside our network.

We also tested Cisco APs with controllers, but again this architecture is not something that would suit us, because of absent central management.

Initial deployment is very easy but tuning and understanding of all things at management can take some time. Once it is set and working – it is very good solution with wide range of possibilities.