After working in WiFi domain for quite sometime I always heard the comparison between Cisco and Aruba but never found a document which clearly says why we should select a particular vendor. I am concluding here whatever I came to know from different sources. I hope this will help you to choose the vendor for your wireless deployment
1. Clean Air
Biggest advantage Cisco has over Aruba is Clean Air. Cisco's clean Air solution is much better compared to Aruba. Interference detection and self healing Cisco scores over Aruba especially after adding MSE to the testbed. Refer the competitive analysis from a third party
2. CCX and client troubleshooting capabilities :
Next point is Cisco's proprietary CCX certification program which make bring most of client card vendors under an umbrella. In simple words CCX compact able clients are more intelligent compared to conventional ones (Almost every client available today is CCX compact able). Let us take a quick example CCX client has the ability to inform the AP about the noise he observe in a particular channel periodically. Based on this input an administrator can change the channel for this to work a customer dont want any costly devices. Most of the CCX implementations are now becoming standard still Cisco always hold the credit to start such an innovation. Another is client troubleshooting, I am still not convinced about how useful this feature is in a customer enviorment or any customer will be ready to experiment the same. Client troubleshooting can provide a user an option to troubleshoot why his client is not able to connect to the network provided you have a CCX Ver5 client with you. Using WCS this feature can be used in a better way.
3. Role based Access - ISE
Identity Service Engine (ISE),Cisco has already talk enough about this wonderful product believe me every single word you heard about this product is worth. I had personally worked on this and it is just amazing. For those who havnt heard about ISE, it is a 4in 1 solution for your ACS, NAC,Profiler and Guest Requirements. Personally I havnt worked on Arubas role based solutions but what I came to know from people who used it is Cisco solution is much better. Traditionally cisco used to categorize user just based on his username ISE can provide close to another 200 option to categorize a user starts from user timezone to the website he is trying to access.
4. WIPS on client serving APs
Cisco APs has the ability to do the WIPS activities on an AP which is serving clients. WIPS is the ability of an AP to detect different set of wireless attacks from an intruder like DoS attack, deauth flood etc. Earlier Cisco used to have this support for the dedicated APs (Monitor mode) which dont serve client. Effectively this provides you a much better security in a lower cost.
5. Video Streaming
Cisco has a multicast unicast feature for Video streaming, this capability handles multicast video streams as uni cast for certain no of clients. I had personally used this feature and the effect is really visible in the performance.
6. Cisco Brand
Apart from features as a brand Cisco always manage to make its customers happy. I always felt Cisco is more a customer driven company than a technology driven company. Anyway you have to depend on Cisco for your infrastructure so it make sense to have wireless solutions also from Cisco in the network. Single point of contact for all your solutions. In the department of customer support and documentation Cisco wins the race hands down . There is no vendor in the networking industry who can compete with Cisco in these aspects. The futuristic product line in wireless domain promises that they are very serious about wireless as a technology and they are going to invest enough on this domain. If they can integrate the wireless solutions to their infrastructure devices it can add lot of value to a customer.Another important point is it is easy to get a trained professionals on Cisco compared to any other vendor.
7. No of big customers
Cisco already control 50+ % in the WiFi market share. Most of the big financials in US and Europe trusted Cisco wireless solutions for the deployment. So it always good to deploy something which already used widely in the market than risk using a new vendor
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