3rd Party Integration

burgessf · ‎02-11-2009

The upper management of my institution has chosen to purchased wireless equipment from ruckus wireless (ruckuswireless.com). We are unhappy about this, but I am asking if anyone here has had problems, conflicts in supporting your Cisco WLAN with this product in your environment?

Leo Laohoo · ‎02-11-2009

What type of 3rd party gear? AP's? It's hard to configure and provision 3rd party AP's because you have to configure each and everyone of them for deployment. With a WLC, you make one configuration (on the WLC) and it's plug-n-play. Another thing is the security monitoring situation. With separate AP's, how do you monitor them?

Let's face it, in current financial situation, non-technical mgmt will always look for the cheapest solution without understanding the implication and impact to their decision. It will be up to the technical managers to make a case to change their mind or set the records straight. The most-used arguments goes in the line of "sure it's the cheapest solution to PURCHASE but I (as the technical manager)have to consider putting XXX amount of people NNN amount of time to configure the darn thing. With a Cisco WLC/AP solution, I just do the configuration once and any additional AP's later on will just get their configuration from the WLC."

My two-cents ...

burgessf · ‎02-12-2009

The 3rd party gear will be Ruckus wireless AP's and a WLC. I agree with much of your sentiment, Leolaohoo, we have cisco wlc's and ap's doing a fine job, AND we have wifi users authenticating to clean access. We have not been able to verify that this ruckus equipment will authenticate through clean access as yet. So the purpose of my post was to find out if other users who are being forced new technology like Ruckus are dealing with mgmt or integration problems.

Leo Laohoo · ‎02-12-2009

I haven't dealt with Ruckus wireless gear. However, in cases of performance comparison between A & B manufacturers is to do either a lab or live test deployment and let MANAGEMENT make the decision for you.

In my case, I set a site (in your case, maybe a building within the campus) with product B (Ruckus) and the rest stays with product A.

Management will then make their decisions based on the number of complaints they receive.

This method sure beats spending time and effort hammering up a document saying why you recommend A to B.