Aruba Wireless Pros and Cons

Aruba is an industry leader. The hardware is on par, and its performance is also on par with anybody else. The Aruba brand really only focuses on wireless, so they're not competing their R&D for switching data center products and cloud security. They're really focused on that and their underlying key pieces. They provide a role-based authentication that is native to the controller. A lot of other systems don't do that. They won't provide you the ability to basically have everybody join the network, regardless of whether or not they share the same network space, the SSID, or the wireless LAN. You can segment it down to a specific user role based on any kind of attributes that you like. That's their differentiator. If you need per user, per device, or per port segmentation, you can get that with Aruba. There isn't another vendor who does it.

The technical support is very good.

It is easy to install and deploy.

It has an aesthetically pleasing GUI for configuration.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it can work with many devices. It supports everything that we need it to.

Aruba Wireless is easily scaled between a lot of devices and a lot of endpoints. When we decided to use it as our solution, we had planned to use it exactly for its ability to scale.

I have not experienced any bugs, software, or hardware issues with Aruba.

The most valuable feature of Aruba Wireless is application monitoring.

There is no problem with downtime.

The solution is quite stable and very robust.

Aruba Wireless offers a good user experience.

Aruba Wireless is stable and we plan to continue using it in the future.

Currently, the stability of the code is the basic underlying problem for us. They had an 8.6 release that came out two weeks ago, but we had to migrate twice because the code wasn't stable. We can't get things to work the same way. Version 8 was a big change for them. They made a change so that it is forced to be a managed hierarchical system. It means that you make changes at the top, and it pushes them downstream. There are a lot of problems with the 8.6 version code. I ran into four bugs in one week and was informed that we should just move onto the next one because all of those fixes have taken place. The feedback loop for fixes is not always really relayed back to you. I don't have a lot of strong things to say about version 8.6. When we had version 6, the controller was pretty much rock solid. We had no problems. We made a heavy investment to migrate a lot of stuff to take advantage of things like WPA3, Wi-Fi 6, and all that kind of stuff, and we haven't been able to turn those features on because we are not confident that they are going to work just yet. So, right now, we're still very much stumbling through the version 8.6 code and just trying to make sure that it is safe before we turn on some of those features. In terms of the marketplace, they are one of the top three leaders. In some respects, one of the things that they focus on is wireless. Therefore, there are some things that should be beyond reproach, as far as I'm concerned. In terms of the stability of the code, there are always going to be bugs, but the core stability of the code needs to be there. When it is not stable, that's a real problem for me because you lose a lot of confidence in the products.

There is a lot of information for users about the product, but it needs to be better organized so that solutions are easier to find.

The urgent areas of improvement would be customer support, better tuned default settings, and documentation.

The upgrades tend to be buggy and better testing is needed before they are released.

Most of the access points don't include the chargers.

For a more senior tool, a local application monitoring related to IoT vendors would be useful.

Aruba needs to be more competitive with newer products. Their legacy makes that more difficult for them.

There needs to be better visibility on the day-to-day monitoring.

The network times for protocol synchronization can be improved.

Better integration with equipment from other vendors would ease the deployment process in some cases.