Aruba Wireless Review

The Wireless integration with ClearPass Policy Manager to give a complete BYOD solution is absolutely the key to today's business requirements. I am sure there is a lot more they can achieve but by far they have been quite innovative in the market.

There are a lot of features that are quite unique to the product. The products from Aruba Network cater for a wide range of organizations, from media companies like BBC, to IT Companies like Microsoft and lots of universities see a perfect fit for their requirements. As an IT Network implementer I can easily see how this product fits the bill for many questions asked by companies today to embrace the future of IT Devices and personal devices at work.

This is an ever growing industry and there are lots of new features that are being requested on a daily basis by different companies, partners and suppliers.

I have used it since 2007, about eight years.

Like any other product there are a few challenges that need to be overcome as most of the organizations have a heterogeneous network. Aruba products can happily sit over your existing network without making a large change to the way the network works. This is the best bit about Aruba Networks.

The product development team is quite good to fix any issues. Considering the large variety of devices and network cards that Aruba has to cater for the number of issue faced have not been significant. They also get a fix out quite quickly before the issue turns into a major problem.

It is a very scalable product. The new centralized licensing and the newer controller models have made scalability even easier.

7/10.

Technical support is one of the strong areas for Aruba and I would rate it as 8/10.

Cisco has always been a close competitor to Aruba Networks but Cisco is much bigger than just wireless hence I think Aruba does justice to what they have to offer and are focused on Wi-Fi only.

The setup is quite straightforward. The solutions can be deployed based on best practices.

The support for implementation both from supplier and vendor is great. The installation definitely takes some ground work and preparation in-house but once it’s all sorted as per the design the product can be fully configured in a couple of days’ time.

I think the ROI is great if it is going to replace the wired environment, but it is not going to descale the wired environment then it needs a bit of a hard sell to meet the ROI.

This is a very subjective question and has many dependencies like the level of discount you can achieve will contribute largely to the initial cost and the everyday running cost is dependent on how many changes or enhancement you want to make at regular basis.

We also looked at Cisco Wireless products.

It is a great product and if you want complete control over your network for wireless users this is definitely the product you should choose.