Aruba Wireless Reviews

For how long have I used the solution?

What other advice do I have?

Managing our data centre network was a challenge. It was designed 15 years ago, before the internet, and not very flexible. If the users had asked us to create a new system we might have had to say no because we didn’t have the space and the bandwidth.

With two networks – one for administration and one for students – to manage, we were certain the old data centre would not serve users’ needs into the future: it had no room for expansion. It was difficult to install new equipment because of the huge amount of cable. We needed a data centre to give us space and where it would be easy to add and remove equipment. The administration had become increasingly dependent on IT services for carrying out its duties. As e-administration capabilities expanded, ensuring delivery of the systems demanded by its seven independent departments was becoming even more crucial. Everything is done electronically today.

Our network supports more than 400 applications, ranging from internal systems for supporting healthcare for the elderly and handicapped to public-facing, self-service applications for the municipality’s 203,000 citizens.

We chose the HP 3800 switches for a number of reasons: we needed a real stack environment, it is a high density switch with 48 1 Gb ports and four 10 Gb ports, it has dual power supply for redundancy, and it has a lifetime warranty. The lifetime warranty is important to us. If a device breaks and is no longer available, HP provides a similar device – a newer version.

At the network’s edge are more than 1,000 devices in 800 different buildings, connected using HP 2600 Series Switches and HP 3500 Series Switches. HP 5400 Series Switches connect 30 backbone devices. HP ProCurve MultiService Mobility Access Points are installed throughout the network to give easy network access to laptops, tablets and smartphones.

We have been working with HP products for the past 15 years. We needed to do this installation quickly and working with products we trusted and knew inside out really helped. There was just no reason to start again with a new vendor. Network deployment took just six weeks. We have helped beta-test HP ProCurve Manager Plus for the past 5 years. 

The whole design creates redundancy, it is a showcase of the right way to do it. The HP 3800 switches not only have the flexibility of a stackable form factor, they have 10 Gb expandability to support bandwidth-intensive applications, providing investment protection for future needs. The flexibility we have is a huge benefit. We now have a system that can cope with future demands and can create new systems demanded by the users. It is much more flexible when you have to add more equipment: we no longer have to pull new cables because they are already installed in the racks. You just have to add the new equipment, put the network connections into the network switches and it just runs the way it should.

When you have 10 Gb links it is easier to add extra VLANs and now we have the option to use 10 Gb everywhere – a huge difference to the 1 Gb links we had previously. The 10 Gb fibre is key to making our network design work. Currently we have 450 km of fibre installed across our municipality. It is now easier to find your way around the network, improving network monitoring significantly. The way it is structured now, monitoring is easier. All the racks are designed the same so it’s much easier to find your way around. All the devices have a unique naming structure and unique address, and all the ports on the switches are designed for a specific purpose – so you know where things are.

Even when a stackable switch is operated with other units, there is only ever a single management interface for the network administrator to deal with. This simplifies the setup and operation of the network. You only have to manage 1 switch for each stack, meaning I only have to manage 5 switches instead of the 24 I would have had to manage previously.

The system is more responsive for the users and we now have a system that can cope with future demands: now that we have the space and the bandwidth we need, we have the ability to create the new systems that the users want.

Cisco or Aruba Networks?

If you are considering wireless access solutions, this is a common question that you are probably asking. You probably have sales people knocking at your door. How do you make sense of all the stories that you are presented with. If you have done any research, you are aware that Cisco and Aruba are the two top names in the wireless access space. This brief posting should give you some insight.

Cisco

Cisco is the undisputed leader in the wireless access market, according to Gartner Research. This leadership number is comprised of four different product lines that are a result of four product acquisitions. Thus, when you are evaluating Cisco, the question is, which product line? When a company has this many product lines, it makes the upgrade path confusing, since there are incompatibilities. There is also the question of which products may eventually be dropped. These product lines are not consistent with user interfaces, policy enforcement, RF patterns, etc. For instance, Cisco ISE won’t work with Cisco Meraki. Cisco 3602 and 3702 high density access points will not work with Meraki. And Meraki will not work with the other Cisco access solutions. With all these development teams working on the same but different products, something needs to change at some point. But we can’t advise you on that.

Meraki has an excellent sales strategy of providing free access points to try. Their online provisioning and user interface are quite appealing. This often results in companies making decisions without properly weighing all the options…including their long term requirements. Careful, unemotional evaluation is vital for any major wireless infrastructure investment.

Aruba Networks

Aruba Networks is the number two wireless access provider on a revenue basis. They are focused on the wireless access business and with such focus, all their products are interoperable. This gives customers a great deal of flexibility with little risk of being trapped in a solution that has little future upgrade potential. Aruba is very strong when it comes to client roaming within a facility or its grounds using Aruba Client Match.

Aruba also operates in a multi-vendor wireless environment. Aruba ClearPass and AirWave are widely used by Cisco customers, since the Aruba functionality outperforms Cisco.

Aruba’s Instant Access Points provide one-touch provisioning of a wireless network. Once one AP is configured with a web interface, every other AP connected to the network is automatically provisioned. Aruba also has a cloud management solution to reduce the capital investment cost for a sophisticated wireless solutions.

So if you are considering Cisco vs Aruba, be sure to do your homework and dig deep. Keep emotion and show out of your decision process.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

To support the success of every student, we leverage Oracle business intelligence tools for predictive modeling to identify when counseling intervention is needed. We need the capacity to run demanding applications, the uptime to operate around the clock, and the agility to react quickly to changing demands. HP and Columbus State University has a long standing relationship that started in 1995. HP account team, VAR partners nurtured that collaboration with CSU in to a successful partnership to lay a solid infrastructure foundation to position the university to transform to a global university.

To meet these goals, we virtualized our data center running VMware software on HP Converged Infrastructure. HP was a natural choice. We had relied on HP servers, networking, and storage for more than a decade. We also use HP Z Workstations in our computer labs, HP notebooks for faculty and staff, and HP printers around campus. We keep abreast of other vendor technologies, but we’ve always had a good relationship with HP. HP integrates well with the VMware platform—and when we upgraded and consolidated our servers, HP was a fantastic guide. We used HP Technology Consulting Services to design a new high performance, energy efficient data center. We consolidated from approximately 200 physical servers down to an eight-blade HP BladeSystem infrastructure that requires less electricity and cooling, and that even reduced footprint enough to allow us to rent out freed floor space. HP consultants came in and worked with us on the design of our revamped data center, all the way from security to redundancy, including air conditioning systems, fiber coming in and out, and generator systems with backups.

At the heart of our data center is the HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure that provides all the power, cooling, and I/O infrastructure needed to support modular server, interconnect, and storage components. I’ve always been impressed by the modularity of HP equipment. You can tailor it to specific needs to be more flexible and to save money. You can add capacity when you need it. Our enclosure houses eight production blade servers. We use HP ProLiant BL685c Server Blades to house most of its test and production virtual machines. A blade is a self-contained server that contains only the core processing elements, making it hot-swappable. For additional storage, blades can connect to another storage blade or to a network attached SAN. We run our test and non-production systems on HP ProLiant DL385 Servers.

The HP StoreVirtual P4500 Storage System gives us a virtualized pool of storage resources to deliver enterprise SAN functionality. You have storage but also brains behind it. You have multiple interconnected servers. The data that gets written out to that storage is spread across all the different servers and disk drives. That gives us two main advantages. One is redundancy, so that if a drive or even an entire storage node goes down, we don’t lose data, and the end user never knows it happened. Two, if you’re writing to or reading from multiple disks, you can store and retrieve data much faster. You spread out the hardware load and the risk across multiple nodes of storage, all acting as one.

We used HP LeftHand SAN/ iQ software to provision and manage storage, and thanks to tight integration between HP and VMware, envision being able to monitor and manage the environment from a central VMware vSphere platform.

HP Networking switches deliver high quality networking services with the modular
ability to add capacity. The HP Networking Lifetime Warranty delivers next-business-day replacement, with phone and email support. One of the reasons HP has a leg up on the competition is its lifetime warranty and maintenance. With some vendors, you have to buy maintenance agreements every year, and that gets expensive. HP Network Management software enables network firmware updates, notifications, and alerts, with single-pane-of- glass control. Recently, we started talking to HP about HP Software-defined Networking (SDN), providing an end-to-end solution to automate the network from data center to campus. We’ll be able to virtualize network components for redundancy, performance and high availability—have multiple physically separate network components act as one unit, so that if switch A goes down switch B takes over for it.

Server provisioning in the virtualized environment takes 30 minutes, compared to 30 days to provision a new physical server. That enables us to quickly adapt our network and systems to accommodate increasing traffic, new services, and demanding applications. Faculty today increasingly run “upside down” classrooms, providing lecture content in multimedia formats to be viewed beforehand, with class time spent working collaboratively in small workgroups. They also expect the latest educational applications to be available quickly in computer labs. In the past, it took a substantial amount of time for our staff to reimage computer lab devices; now the task is quickly accomplished, and we are even able to give end users some self-service access to machines and their functionality. The next step will be to leverage VMware for a more cloudlike, IT-as-a-Service environment in which staff can provision their own resources without calling on our IT department. Our HP CI foundation absolutely will support this evolution.

Another thing the infrastructure now supports is the predictive analytics we employ to trigger counseling intervention for students in need. We use Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition(OBIEE); Oracle Data Integrator (ODI); and Oracle Endeca Information Discovery to analyze unstructured data, such as that generated by social media, to detect when a student might be encountering academic, social, or financial difficulties. We have a goal and responsibility to reach out, intercede, and support students as soon as they are having difficulties. Those things would not have been possible in the old environment; it couldn’t have handled the bandwidth or processing. But successful universities of the future will have to do all this.

Our K-12 school has an extensive campus which hosts 250 faculty and 1500 students, with over 240 students living in boarding houses. Our senior students and faculty members each have a school-provided laptop, while also allowing BYOD access to the network in boarding houses, and throughout the campus for select users.

Our IT team faced numerous security challenges associated with allowing unmanaged devices onto the network. We needed a solution that could accurately and reliably prevent and report threats to the network, no matter who the user or what the device is. Despite implementing measures such as installing local antivirus software on the school-owned machines and intrusion prevention on the firewall, our team was still bogged down with hours of manually identifying and eliminating network threats such as botnets, spyware, and malware—issues that were also impacting student and faculty productivity.

When we approached HP with our challenges, HP delivered the Network Protector SDN Application to identify and block network threats and enable secure BYOD. HP Network Protector Security, running on the HP Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller, enables automated network posture assessment and real-time security across OpenFlow-enabled network devices such as switches.

One of the concerns with implementing an SDN solution is knowing where to start. We were able to implement an SDN solution quickly because of our investment in OpenFlow-enabled hardware. We were able to take advantage of the Network Protector SDN solution by downloading a free software upgrade for our existing switches to enable OpenFlow, eliminating the need for a costly rip-and-replace of our network infrastructure.

Network Protector leverages the Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller and OpenFlow to program the network infrastructure with security intelligence from the TippingPoint RepDV Labs database. This effectively turns the entire network infrastructure into security-enforcement devices, providing unprecedented threat protection and visibility.

We installed the solution during a school break, and saw instant results when students and faculty returned. Immediately, thousands of threats were automatically identified and blocked by HP Network Protector, and our IT team was able to proactively address network vulnerabilities.

HP Network Protector takes away a lot of the manual labor that we used to do; we now know exactly where the infections are and how many there are—we can detect threats and respond in a proactive manner. That saves us hours of work every week.

We use Network Protector to help us with challenges around sites like Facebook, which are a distraction during class. With the DNS Blacklist feature, we restrict access to websites like that, which encourages the staff and students to engage more with one another during class. It’s hard for us to measure the return on investment that we’ve had with HP Network Protector, but there’s no doubt that it gives us the power to help staff and students be more productive in the classroom; and at the end of the day, that’s what we’re all about.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What other advice do I have?