Wireless Access

Okay Her is what we have on this discutions

Im trying to be objective so if someone know something good of HP let me know to add it  by now i got this:

For our advantage we have

1-App RF

2-Build in ICSA Firewall certfied(which will let us to trully give priority of traffic)

3-Build in IPS/IDS

4-Client Match(coming soon)

5-Vlan poolin

6-L3 Fail Over

7-Derived Roles feature

8-VPN Concentrator(RAPS and VIA Funtionality)

9-Better Dashboard

10-Airgroup

11-Airplay

HP advantage

1-Cheaper

I

HP doesn't support any spectrum analysis right now.  Also no load balancing, airtime fairness, nor mitigation of co-channel interference.  Their WIPS/WIDS is an OEM of AirTight.  You have multiple overlapping products for Identity Manager, etc that are all different interfaces vs one pane of glass with AirWave.  That's a start.  

i have to manage existent hp wireless infrastructure with msm720 mobility controller..... the worst exeprience in my life...

msm firewall is poor... ap firewall is ridicolous...

ap config is awful... once configured and ap you've to be sure controller is sincronized with ap....

internal captive portal is very low customizable..

and finally... never call support....

i've to do once... and it's faster to search in the forum by yourself... because forum user have more experience than hp support.

in summary:

maybe you pay less the hardware but if the infrastructure is big you will loose more money to startup the infastracture... so pay more but with aruba but you will be sure that everything will works... and if you will have any issue the super aruba support will fix it in a moment.

Good info

Please keep them coming! thats one of our biggest competitors here in my country....

We win actually pretty easy agains cisco when we duel it...

I have been investigating and found a few things about newest HP Controllers

Features and benefits
Management
Wi-Fi Clear Connect
provides a system-wide approach to deliver WLAN reliability by proactively determining and adjusting to changing RF conditions;
optimizes WLAN performance by detecting interference from Wi-Fi and non-Wi-Fi sources using Spectrum Analysis capabilities
built into the MSM430 and MSM46x access points, identifying rogue activity (MSM410, MSM430, and MSM46x), and making
decisions at a system-wide level
Advanced radio resource management
Automatic radio power adjustments
include real-time power adjustments based on changing environmental conditions and signal coverage adjustment
Automatic radio channel
provides intelligent channel switching and real-time interference detection
Intelligent client load balancing
determines the number of clients across neighboring APs and adjusts client allocation to balance the load
Airtime fairness
helps ensure equal RF transmission time for wireless clients
Spectrum Analysis (requires MSM430 or MSM46x models)
Power/frequency spectrum analysis
measures noise from IEEE 802.11 remote sources
Signal detection/classification
identifies source of RF interference, for example, Bluetooth, cordless phones, and microwave ovens
Evaluation of channel quality
helps detect severe channel degradation and improves the reporting of poor RF performance

 Seems that they now support Band steering, airtime fairness, client load banancing(how good it is? i have no idea...)

But i can no longer say it does not support it... because it does...

This is where i read it

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13271_div/13271_div.pdf

For our advantage we have

1-App RF

2-Build in ICSA Firewall certfied(which will let us to trully give priority of traffic)

3-Build in IPS/IDS

4-Client Match(coming soon)

5-Vlan poolin

6-L3 Fail Over

7-Derived Roles feature

8-VPN Concentrator(RAPS and VIA Funtionality)

Anyone can add things to the list?

I would like to have like many features but being realistic....

Like maybe i could do a table in the first message of

HP VS ARUBA

So anyone can read it

Also would be cool if someone could put it to a non soo technical level so a non technical manager can undrstand the difference....

My issue when im speaking to people like this, they just dont undrestand sometimes what im trying to tell them and as they dont they just dont ignore those things....

If im talking with an IT guy there is no issue with it.   But i bet many of you had to deal with Managers with not soo technical approach which i dont know if anyone could put like a list of things on this

i can make only example on HP 5.7 version

Aruba have a wonderfoul dashboard that help you to find out network issue before became a problem and is enought easy to be used directly from customer with read-only account,

Hp need en external monitoring feature provided with additional price with HP PCM and is not easy and intuitive as Aruba Dashboard

here a screenshot of hp ver 5.7.2

1- poor dashboard

2- no locate on map feature

wireless is poor, rouge-ap feature without map is bad.. i know that i've a problem but i don't know where...

There was something interesting i found out today

it seems that HP got something like the AP93H but their version is b/g uplink of 100mbs.... 4 ports of 100mbs, and of course its cheap...

I went today to a chain hotel owners... and well in the last hotel they build it seems that

it was Rukus vs HP vs Aruba(we were not participating it was another partner)

The thing is that they found the Aruba one really expensive...and choosed HP because of the cheap AP93H version of them.... and of course it was cheaper than aruba...

My asnwer to them was that you they have to be careful with those things i know its cheap and everthing but think in a future... you will eventually have all mobile devices on 802.11ac cards and as we know it... it will not support 2.4ghz frequency unless is AC card and also 2.4ghz n card at the same time?.   Which mean they will have to buy again everything! if its not like it

Now he told me that he didnt know that and if he knew he would have not pick HP.   It seems now we have a chance in the next hotels they are building which should be finished at the end of this year,  and i hope they buy aruba next time :)

I updated my first message if anyone knows or think im wrong in something please correct me and i will correct it

Lets try being the most objective we can, Not like hp sucks aruba rules

If you know what i mean...

Hi All

I have dealt extensively with HP MSM series wireless specifically in Education environments.

I have had nothing but troubles with this wireless platform since it was introduced. There have been a number of issues that I have seen.

1. Their Auto channel and power management just does not work. I have had a stand up fight in my office with their lead product developer about this and he could not understand that not having effective channel and power management was a problem. Never mind the fact that I have 200 AP's that are simultaneously all using the same channel at full power at one school. When you do enable auto channel and power management the radios even through you say adjust a say 1 am in the morning, randomly throughout the day their radios will just switch off and go dark as they sort out their auto channel and power then funnily enough as all the radios are offline together they all pick the same channel at full power again. I had to manually tweak 200 AP's channel and power. Not fun in a supposed centrally managed wireless network.

2. I have seen massive interoperability issues with Apple devices on HP wireless. Random wireless dropouts connectivity issues etc. Windows based systems and adroid seem to be ok.

3. Support is terrible.

4. I have had one site where HP has replaced 200+ AP's not once but twice due to faulty batches of AP's and random faults that were occurring such as AP image corruption.

5. These issues happened mainly with the MSM 765 controllers and MSM422's which they no longer sell in Australia due to the issues but I have also seen similar issues with MSM460's.

6. They have a bug in their SNMP code which will result in having to restart the controller at regular intervals. Again not fun if heaven forbid you want to gather snmp traps.

7. Their controller does not fully support radius accounting, it does not pass the IP address to the accounting server which means that you are not able to integrate into a lot of proxy servers that now support radius accounting as a form of single sign on to the proxy.

8. Their wireless mesh will just stop passing trafic for no reason. 

The company I work for has estimated that support HP MSM products has cost us in excess of $200,000 in support, time and revenue that we have been unable to bill anyone for. It has also cost the company in terms of reputation and customers.

Meanwhile we had also Been doing some smaller installs of Aruba Wireless and never had an issue. It finally took for myself and the other wireless engineer threatening to quit if we sold another HP wireless solution for the company to ditch the product.

Since then we have only sold Aruba and have never looked back.

Sure HP is cheaper but you get what you paid for. If you can get them to demo both systems and get them to enable features such as auto channel and power and watch their system fail.

Anyway that's my feelings on the subject. I hope that helps any of you out there that come up against it.

Really Good info

Thanks for your reply

Hello-

We just spent the last 5 years battling HP Wireless MSM gear.  We upgraded to Aruba in January.  It has been a world of difference, mainly on the controller management side.  We have around 4300 AP's and 22 M3's in a fully redundant setup now, and we had 64 MSM765's and no redundancy with less AP's deployed.  Hopefully this helps!

Matt

Really great info.. thank you very much...

It would be great if any of you compile it in form of document and share it with others.