Cisco's Meraki MR Series is a wireless LAN solution.
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HPE Networking Instant On Access Points
Score 8.5 out of 10
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HPE Networking Instant On Access Points, formerly under the Aruba Networks brand, are presented as fast WLAN solutions for small to midsize businesses, supporting indoor and outdoor connectivity, in any environment and for any number of devices.
Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points are very easy to install, configure, and manage. Centralized management offers excellent features, and especially if you have multiple locations where the access points are installed, they're very easy to manage, saving you a lot of time. …
Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points has been easier to configure and deploy even with more complex network configurations than we were able to do with other products. The cloud dashboard has been ahead of the competition even from the early days of Meraki. Having layer 7 …
The Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points fare really well against HPE Aruba AP. The cost difference is minimal on the hardware although things get more expensive on support and subscription cost (on going cost). Speed and throughput seems to be better on Cisco Meraki (user …
I believe others dashboards are more complex, not so simplified compared to Meraki. This user-friendly aspect of Meraki really sets it apart for many businesses looking for a straightforward and efficient way to manage their network. Compared to the price range Meraki has and …
I would personally always recommend Meraki over the above for ease of deployment and management. My only reservation is you feel like you never really own the equipment... its more like you're leasing it and that the end it all just stops working. Where with the above products, …
Metals is a cloud-based management portal for their MR AP with is best and none have the same functionality. We can manage and deploy access points from anywhere in the world. All we have to engage is just physical installation. As of today, Aruba can offer anything close to …
These products usually offer more features and control. Most of the time, they aren't necessary. The Meraki MR platform is simple and easy - it gets the job done and doesn't require much time or much of a learning curve.
Cisco Meraki Stacks give us the ability to implement an entire network and security solution that impacts tremendously in the productivity of our employees, just because we have 1 Dashboard to manage an entire company network and security with ML include an easy-to-use web …
I have found Cisco Meraki is easier to build, configure, deploy, administer, and troubleshoot whether on-site or remotely. It also is easier to enable non-IT people to be able to help troubleshoot remotely when on IT resources are not on site.
When comparing Aruba Instant Wi-Fi Access Points to Cisco Meraki MR the most significant factors are pricing and license fees. At the current cost of one Meraki MR AP, we can deploy three Aruba Instant Wi-Fi Access Points, providing equivalent functionality, coverage, and …
The performance of the Aruba Instant Wi-Fi Access Points works very well when there are many users per access point. The possibilities for security settings and setting up the wifi network according to an extensive company policy are possible. This requires some knowledge, but …
It's ideal if the company frequently uses mobile devices that need to work on Wi-Fi. It's also ideal if a company has multiple locations. Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points can then be easily deployed and managed via a central Meraki Dashboard. It also offers a powerful content filtering feature within the Cisco Meraki environment. This can be particularly useful for guest networks and in locations where certain content cannot be downloaded, such as a school.It's less suitable if a company has a limited IT budget and the network needs to be continuously expanded. In those cases, the associated license costs can quickly add up. In factories or other robustly built environments, RF tuning isn't feasible. As a result, the signal quality can sometimes be somewhat reduced.
It is possible that we have a bad luck with the deployment. However, It is capable to perform enterprise-level security to fit some of the organization's standards. With Airwave and other tools, it's easy to manage and administrate your wireless environment. Make aware of the IPsec tunnel from each user to the controller if you are using Clearpass for NAC. If you have a remote office with local resources, you will need controller or IAP to route traffic locally. If you have many remote offices, you will need to deploy controllers or IAP in each office, which lead to additional cost and management.
It's cloud based, so as long as we have an internet connection, we can access it. Whenever we push a change, it's one stop like a single pane of glass to manage all our equipment. And so that's what I liked about it.
They offer both a controller-based and controller-less option. This allows customers of all sizes to deploy a wireless network without the upfront cost of controller hardware. A controller can be added later.
Aruba also offers Airwave which is a single management point for all AP swarms in the environment. It offers many reporting features as well as visual RF maps displaying heatmaps of the AP signals and client positioning.
The Aruba Access Point we have (224s and 225s) also offer both PoE and external power supplies for those smaller deployments that may not have PoE capable switches.
We have had a bunch of these stop working after a power outages. We are guessing a surge or something caused them to stop working.
Some of the documentation is outdated. It seems they like to make changes to how things work and it usually mean less access and insight into the devices you manage.
The auto signal strength feature could use a little work. It seems like even when we turn it down all the way it tries ot increases the signal strength.
It is a solution that works very well. It is almost like setup and forget, since the solution works. When issues occur, documentation is available with detailed steps on how to solve this problems you are facing, of course Technical Support is always ready to help. We have had instances where an Access Point fails and within 2 days we have the replacement
To get basic functionality doesn't take long. Set up a new Meraki Dashboard activate the licenses and get internet connection for the APs and you are more or less done. The Dashboard will find your items and you're good to go.
It is a good and stable product, and does exactly what it is intended for. It provides a good wifi connection, and ensures that the users on the work floor can do their work well. In addition, there are so many technical possibilities, that you can configure the wifi network completely to the specific wishes of the work floor.
We have not had any issues with the Meraki WiFi Access Point hardware but we did encounter a problem with a Meraki LAN switch that failed to power up. Upon a email into the Meraki Support, they promptly called back and we went over some quick tests to determine a power supply problem. A replacement LAN switch was sent to me the next day.
Aruba Wireless Network support has always been reliable and great to work with. There was a period during the HPE acquisition of Aruba Wireless where getting in touch with an engineer took somewhat longer than usual, but it still was not a huge issue. The most difficult part of the merger was getting an accurate view of our inventory according to HPE Aruba as they were merging/choosing a system to host all of that information.
There were documents that detailed how the WiFi Access Point was to be installed and mounted. The only issue was to cable the device, we use a third party for this type of work and typically has to be performed after normal business hours. Other than that, the installation was easy.
We were more on a Cisco Wireless Controller set up, which takes a lot longer to control and that's why we've actually gone through a cloud-based product, which is very easy compared with the old traditional way that we used to have. It's more ease of software. They've got very similar features, but it's easy to set up and maintain into the future.
When comparing Aruba Instant Wi-Fi Access Points to Cisco Meraki MR the most significant factors are pricing and license fees. At the current cost of one Meraki MR AP, we can deploy three Aruba Instant Wi-Fi Access Points, providing equivalent functionality, coverage, and performance.
As far as I know, it's 10. I mean, because like I said, I manage stuff in the south. I have coworkers that manage it in the north. And so the scalability of it to be able to be go in and see the configurations of the ones in the north as well as they can see in the south. So across the board, it works really well for how widespread out it is.
Uptime has improved significantly. The dashboard automatically keeps devices up to date by scheduling upgrades at remote times (say 2am on a Sunday)
Swapping to Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points has reduced the management overhead. No more long controller software hardware upgrades and obviously no more need for beefy central controllers.
The newest version upgrade is somewhat cumbersome as they want us to replace hardware, which seems silly, so we are on the most current legacy supported version. Once unsupported, we will need to replace hardware.
