The main reason I chose to implement the HP WLC was due to the limitations of our previous Sonicwall WLC not being able to have layer three provisioning. I would say that feature is the most valuable.
President at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Cisco vs. Aruba Wireless Solutions
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.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
IT Specialist at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
Allowed us to have one controller at our central location and still provide wireless to our outlying clinics.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
With our old wireless network, we had to put controllers at every location to have wireless access. This product allowed us to have one controller at our central location and still provide wireless to our outlying clinics.
What needs improvement?
The user interface on the product isn’t terribly intuitive in some areas, especially when setting up VSC’s.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using HP MSM 720 Mobility Controller and 40 HP since April 2014, so approximately 10 months.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
I experienced a few issues while deploying the controller. Getting the product to work correctly with a back end RADIUS server proved to be a bit of a task and the lack of documentation didn’t help either.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability wise the product has been fairly rock solid. I can’t think of any time I have had to even reboot it since I implemented it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The particular model (MSM 720) doesn’t provide much in terms of scalability. It only allows for 40 Access Points which my company has about that number.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
Customer service on the phone I would rate fairly poorly. On more than one occasion I could not understand the agent or would get disconnected, however, online customer service is much better.
Technical Support:I have only used the HP forums for technical support and it has a pretty good following and a lot of knowledgeable users.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used a Sonicwall NSA3500 for all our needs. We switched due to the lack of Layer three provisioning at the time plus I wasn’t a fan of one device controlling so many aspects of our network and security.
How was the initial setup?
I would say complex, mainly due to the lack of good documentation. All together, it took me about a week to fully get the product in a production state. Coming from a Cisco background it seemed much more cumbersome than their products.
What about the implementation team?
We used an in house team (me).
What was our ROI?
I am not sure of the ROI at the moment. It has not been implemented long enough for any significant ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Original setup cost for this implementation was around $30,000. Day-to-day the product costs nothing.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Any time we have a project we must have three viable options to choose from. We looked at HP, Cisco and Meru.
What other advice do I have?
- Have a strong knowledge of your internal network
- Study the manual as much as possible
- Focus on VSC’s and Vlan configuration
- If you come from a Cisco background keep in mind you won’t use an access port on the switch port connected to the AP like you would in a Cisco WLC setup, but instead either a trunk or tagged port
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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Aruba Wireless
December 2025
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Executive Director Ops and Infra at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
We needed the ability to be flexible or add capacity when necessary.
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.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Head of Technical Services with 51-200 employees
Enables automated network posture assessment and real-time security across OpenFlow-enabled network devices.
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.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Associate Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
The new centralized licensing have made scalability easier than it was in the past.
What is most valuable?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used it since 2007, about eight years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a very scalable product. The new centralized licensing and the newer controller models have made scalability even easier.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
7/10.
Technical Support:Technical support is one of the strong areas for Aruba and I would rate it as 8/10.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
The setup is quite straightforward. The solutions can be deployed based on best practices.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We also looked at Cisco Wireless products.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Channel System Engineer-MEA at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Easy to deploy. I especially like the Adaptive Radio Management feature.
What is most valuable?
Adaptive Radio Management
How has it helped my organization?
We're a VAR and it's our best selling solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
Two years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
No issues encountered.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
No issues encountered.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
No issues encountered.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
Fast response and professional teams. You can add new patches to match your requirements.
Technical Support:Fast response and professional teams. You can add new patches to match your requirements.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No previous solution used.
How was the initial setup?
It is straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
We used a vendor team and their level of experience was excellent.
What other advice do I have?
Aruba focuses on high-end WLAN technologies. They are now certified with many other vendors to be used in conjunction with their products. It is easy to deploy and there are many other benefits.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. we're a VAR
it_user375078Senior Network Engineer/Mobility Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Top 20Real User
Adaptive radio management is key!
System Architect - Networks at a university with 501-1,000 employees
The initial setup required a lot of work however the scalability is the key for the solution
What is most valuable?
The scalability is the key here. We operate in a multi-vendor environment, running proprietary and open source software as well as pretty much every OS in it. We have to be able to adjust features as we need them throughout the WLAN.
How has it helped my organization?
WLAN is one of the major functions that allows employee movement without re-doing cabling etc.
What needs improvement?
I haven't encountered an area for improvement and am quite satisfied with the product.
For how long have I used the solution?
We implemented WLAN 4 years ago.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
We haven't encountered any major issues with the deployment. Normal minor glitches as usual, but nothing major. I'd expect to face the same issues with any brand of WLANs.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
All stability issues have been due to configuration changes. Currently as the WLAN expands we are starting to have some issues that aren't directly dependent on Arubas' solution, but issues in aggregate and core network layers.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have no issues in scalability.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
8 out of 10.
Technical Support:8 out of 10.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I'm familiar via my career with other manufacturers solutions and have worked with those too. In my current position we have used Arubas' WLAN from the start.
How was the initial setup?
As always in complex systems, initial setup required a lot of work that might be seen as complex. On the other hand it was also logical and among the professionals, straightforward. Initial setup of single equipment is easy, but it only allows you to start configuring it.
What about the implementation team?
We did the implementation in-house with a technical person from the manufacturer.
What was our ROI?
Every AP implemented takes out around 3 switch interfaces. Also work can be done away from the desk, and much faster in certain positions. I'd say that it took about three years to get an ROI.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did a massive comparison with most of the WLAN vendors and from those we chose Aruba.
What other advice do I have?
Main thing is to have a clear vision of what is needed from the WLAN and of course, the expertise of the staff is one key factor. Pretty much, the rest is just pricing of the solution, acquisition and running costs.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
it_user375078Senior Network Engineer/Mobility Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Top 20Real User
Aruba is a very solid product with options that allow it to keep up with all the competitors.
Network Engineer at a university with 501-1,000 employees
We don't need to visit each AP locations for a code upgrade or troubleshooting but some went bad over time.
What is most valuable?
Central controller and ARM function on Access Points.
How has it helped my organization?
We don't need to visit each AP locations for a code upgrade or troubleshooting.
What needs improvement?
More stable cide
For how long have I used the solution?
6 years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
Some of them have cable limitations.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Yes, we did. Some model of APs went bad over time.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
No, we don't as long as we purchase the license.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
Almost excellent.
Technical Support:Almost excellent.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Yes, we did. It was Cisco Autonomous APs, but we replaced them as we wanted a centralized system.
How was the initial setup?
It was pretty straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
We used a vendor and they were very knowledgeable.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Yes we also evaluated Cisco Lightweight APs.
What other advice do I have?
You should start implementing the latest and greatest access points which are 801.11 AC.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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Updated: December 2025
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Great assessment!