Aerohive, Juniper or Cisco Wireless Solution Rollout

[danjob]

Hello All,

we are looking at rolling out a wireless solution across campus. does anybody know anything about the Aerohive Wireless solution and Junipers Trapeze Wireless Solution?

Which solution offers the best coverage and roaming etc?

which one is better, controller or controllerless wireless solution pros & cons?

How do these solutions stack up against a Cisco solution?



Thanks in advance


Danjob

 

[unclerico]

*** First of all let me say that I do not work for and in no way am I affiliated with Aerohive ***

With that said, I LOVE, I mean LOVE, their product. It is exceptional in all aspects. There are sooo many good things that they do:
1) Controllerless. No controller, no choke point, no added expenses when you need to put APs in remote locations. The HiveManager can be a physical appliance, a VM, or it can be in the "cloud". The 1U version can managed up to 5000 APs with ease. If you lose the HM everything still works fine.
2) The APs are extremely intelligent in that they have their own protocols to dynamically configure channel selection, power, neighborship, etc.
3) Layer 2 shortest path algorithm to route around failures. APs are configured in "hives" so that they can communicate amongst each other. If the network link goes down (but the AP still has power), the APs will use either the a or b/g antenna (you can specify which) to form a failover link with the closest neighbor and allow clients to continue to pass traffic
4) If you have a soho environment or traveling teams of people you can give them an AP and configure it to be a VPN end-point so that anyone connected to it will be able to tunnel back to your HQ. It can also do NAT as well.
5) Stateful firewall built in
6) If you have an environment that is small and you don't want to pay for the HiveManager appliance, you can get some of their AP300 series and have one of the APs act as a mini HiveManager whereby you can push configurations and monitor up up to 11 other APs
7) Layer 2 and Layer 3 roaming
8) No defined roles meaning an AP can act as both a bridge as well as client access point
9) If you place the APs high on the ceiling they are naturally very difficult to plug into should there be an issue. The Aerohive APs can dynamically (or statically) provision an Access Console SSID that allows up to two people to connect (via WPA/WPA2) and diagnose issues

I could go on and on. This is the ONLY solution that I recommend as it is exceptional in all types of environments.

Cisco is Cisco. I believe they are coming out with their version of a controllerless solution, but you will pay more.

Trapeze is terrible. We had them in for a POC (when it was Trapeze and not not Juniper) and it was the worst product I've ever seen.

Call Aerohive and have them send you a couple of AP340's and set you up with the cloud-based HiveManager. Do a POC with it. You will be extremely impressed. Tell 'em Dennis from MN sent you ;-)

I hate all Uppercase... I don't want my groups to seem angry at me all the time! =)
- ColdFlame (vbscript forum)

 

[jdeisenm]

For sure strong centralized management is the way to go if you get over 10 access points. Look at price of the intial purchase cost and the price of continued support. It seems network companies will charge about 20% for support each year so over the life of the product you will pay for it twice.