I looked at Ubiquiti, Cisco, and some other solutions, but I have a friend who works for Aruba. I opted to go with Aruba after chatting with him about where it's positioned in the market. Aruba seems to be a leader, especially in wireless access points and some of the newer capabilities and features. 

I was looking for network switches that could be managed with the same wireless access points in one console, so that gave it to me with Aruba. Some people are fine with having one console for switches and another for wireless access points. As a solo managed service provider, I'm all about simplicity, so I was really looking for one solution that would handle both. 

My company may opt to upgrade our network and infrastructure in the future, so we are considering the switches from Aruba and Cisco.

Aruba is cost-effective. I have a direct account manager who used to visit us to understand the complete requirement. On the other hand, Cisco costs way too much for the same kind of switching device. 

I think Aruba did a better job compared to many other vendors. In the end, I just wanted a solution that could serve the university's requirements. We have tested many different products like Alcatel Extreme and others.

We've compared Aruba to many switches, including Cisco and Juniper. However, Cisco is more comparable and Juniper has a very limited product profile. Cisco and Aruba are very similar.

I have also used Cisco switches and they are harder to set up.

As a public hospital we are obliged to implement a public bidding process. We had been in discussions with many companies, including, for example, Cisco. 

In the end, it came down to financial issues. Once you have your requirements fixed, every Vendor has the chance to give you a proper offer through ist sales channel. With all the requirements, including for example common management of wired and wireless access, WLAN integrated Bluetooth capabilities  Cisco failed to meet the offer of Aruba.

I work with both Aruba and Cisco switches. Cisco switches are very good. They have a lot of good features. Cisco invests a lot of money into their products, such as their Catalyst switches, but Aruba, by contrast, provides normal switches. Cisco produces some features like containers. You can use containers to install some applications on the switch, which is a very good feature. You can put a firewall image like Wireshark on a switch to protect your LAN. You can send some packets to your network to monitor it. Aruba has good switches, but they are not high-technology.

We are considering migrating from Aruba to possibly Cisco, or to Fortinet FortiSwitch.

We are comparing and conducting studies in order to move forward.

We also evaluated Cisco Meraki. I did not choose Meraki because of the licensing model. If for some reason you don't renew the subscription, you lose the network and the configuration. With Aruba it's a different story. If you stop your support, you still own your own network so that was one of the major differences.

We evaluated Cisco Ethernet Switches.

The most popular vendors for this type of product in the UAE are Cisco, HPE, and Ruckus.

We have also used Cisco switches and they provide a similar feature set.

We looked at the Cisco option, but since we already had Aruba wireless and we had virtually no Cisco products in our environments, we went for Aruba. 

I prefer the ICX switches from Ruckus over this solution.

We supply both Ruckus and Aruba solutions to our customers, but regarding stability, future upgrades, and scalability, we prefer Ruckus over Aruba. We have deployed Ruckus with fewer headaches after finalizing the deployments. I open perhaps five cases in a year with Ruckus and I can open ten tickets or ten cases with Aruba.