Wireless Access

I'm the network engineer at a city school district and we are currently in the planning stages of replacing all switches in our district with Aruba mobility switches. We are also considering taking control of our network completely. We currently have 3000 series controllers at most locations and soon to have them at all locations. I've been thinking about the design for our core and the possibility of our network being an all Aruba network. We currently have a Cisco 7200 router provided by our ISP. I'm curious...could a 6000 series controller handle the routing and firewall responsibilities comparable to that 7200? I know there are a lot of factors needed for comparison but just compare hardware to hardware. Very interested to see what the community thinks and possibly even doing. Thanks,

Like you said it would depend on many variables. What throughput are y ou looking for on your core?

 

Here are some specs from the aruba docs:

 

The Aruba 5100
A single 5100 supports up to 8 Gbps of unencrypted traffic and 4 Gbps of encrypted throughput (3DES SHA-1), 8192 simultaneous users, and 256 APs. The A5100 supports up to 48 10/100 ports or up to 4 GBIC ports.

 

The Aruba Supervisor Card 6000
The Aruba 6000 Supervisor Card (SC-6000-C) is the same as the Aruba 5000 Supervisor Card (SC-5000-C) except the SC-6000-C crypto accelerator consists of 16 cores— compared with eight supported by the SC-5000-C. The SC-6000-C
supports 256 Mbytes of memory—compared with 128 Mbytes of memory for the SC-5000-C.

 

So as the 6000 supervisor card is double the spec I assume double the throughput would be a valid guess.

 

Hope this helps.

 

James

Just to clarify the 5000 (same as the 6000) and 6000 are chassis that simply provide power to the M3 controller module.  Link is below. To this what is the edge routing protocol that you are using on the 7000 series Cisco today? What type of WAN interfaces are required?

 

6000 Chassis and M3 Data Sheet.

http://www.arubanetworks.com/pdf/products/DS_A6000.pdf

 

Yeah I understand it is a chassis but thanks for the clarification. Guess I should have referenced the M3 instead. I will have to check with our ISP about what protocol they are using. The WAN interfaces are a combination 1GB GBIC Fiber and 1GB RJ45 so connectivity should not be an issue. Thanks for the data sheet links.

Any idea on the routing protocol in use?  We only support a subset of OSPF.

Yeah, as I mentioned, I'll have to check with our ISP. 

I would imagine your ISP is using BGP.  But, whatever they are using, if they are just taking a default route, you really don't even need a dynamic routing protocol.  Just use a static for default that points to the ISP's upstream router.

I agree. The only time this wouldn't be the case is if you had multiple ISP connections. If you only have one ISP connection, you should be fine.

I was thinking something very similar about a static route. I didn't really see why our router would need a dynamic routing protocol just as long as we had a route to the ISP. I will still ask our ISP for curiosity's sake.

 

Thanks Mike and zjennings.

I'm a big supporter of simplicity, but if this router is going to be the only L3 device in your network, I wouldn't want it to be an all-in-one solution (ie, router + distribution switch + wireless controller). Rather, I would want a dedicated piece of infrastructure to perform my core routing functions.

I'm also not convinced that the controller is a great performer in that role, so I'd be interested to hear how others have implemented as such.

If placed in our network as a core router, it would not be the only L3 device but it would be the gateway to the internet. It would serve as the device that connects directly to our ISP's device and probably also serve as the backup master controller. I would also like to use one as a main distribution switch between all our locations which would also serve as the master controller. I figured it probably couldn't compete with a dedicated router but I love the thought of having an all Aruba network. 

 

Good to hear your thoughts on an M3 serving in this role. Maybe something Aruba should start thinking about!