I came across this thread late but to put my two cents in:
The quoted cloud services threads seem to apply to Meraki more than Aerohive. Meraki is cloud controlled while Aerohive is cloud managed. If the cloud is inaccessible for whatever reason Meraki is dead in the water (this comes from experience) while Aerohive just keeps working. Also when Aerohive comes out of support it just keeps working while, as the threads showed, Meraki shut the entire wireless network down.
If you went to the Aerohive forums and asked the same question there you would get very different answers. Both Aerohive and Aruba make excellent products with different strengths and weaknesses but I don't believe that one is "better" than the other although one may be better suited to the requirements for a particular customer. Obviously you look at each deployment on a case by case basis.
If there is one thing I would like to see improved with Aruba it is the WLC's GUI. Currently it is a bit of a mess. It looks like what a group of university physics students would come up with in a lab where they are testing radio signals. The wizards and "all profiles" sections help but there is no single place that shows how an access point or role is configured. I would like to see:
- A "network overview" section where you can see all the SSIDs, authentication types, roles, VLANs, etc. listed on a single screen. You should be able to click on any of the objects and go to their configuration area.
- If you click on an access point in the "network overview" section you should be able to see and adjust that access point's settings (channel, transmit power, SSIDs assigned, protocols assigned (802.11v,k,r, etc.))
- A "roles" section where all the roles are listed and every attribute (firewall settings, rate limiting, VLAN assignement, etc) applied to that role is accessible.
Aruba has an excellent role based access control system but if you put a junior wireless engineer infront of the Aruba WLC they wouldn't be able to find most of it and this, I believe, is an disservice to the Aruba system.
I would challenge Michael's comment re Aruba's Instant products. Having tested the Instant OS against the HiveOS (Aerohive) it is very obvious that HiveOS has far more functionality than the Instant OS. That said, the new IAP103 gives cost sensitive customers a large number of enterprise features (layer seven firewall, radio management, WIPs, spectrum analysis, etc.) at the same price point as SOHO products like Ubiquiti. Aerohive do not have an access point at this price point.
In terms of your existing customers you would need a very good reason to change from Aruba as they have a large amount of money invested in the access points, WLCs, etc. Do you have such a reason?