Hi,
Yes of course, Instant AP is a good choise. You can deploy your wireless network in a few minutes. ( is less expensive ) But we must explain the biggest differences:
Perfomance: Aruba Instant AP dedicate part of their ability to work in controlled solution assumes the controller, such as WPA2 encryption decryption,
In most cases this is not necessarily a reason to choose one path or another.
Features. The bulk of the new features appear on both platforms, but tend to appear earlier version that controlled for "Instant" version.
Optimization of traffic flows. In case you opt for a solution with driver, traffic in tunnel mode always travels to the controller, while in the case of Instant solution, you usually switch traffic locally.
Configuration locally. The AP carry in instant mode settings locally, so that, if you lost the iap, that information would go into the AP. On campus AP (controller) the ap have not the config file.
End to End Encryption. The Aruba controller architecture centralizes encryption on the controller, a central point in a protected environment, the datacenter. The Aruba Instant APs do not encrypt traffic to a controller.
Network architecture. Which, is the biggest difference between Instant and controllers. The architecture for Instant AP (switch traffic locally) , it must be connected to ports in "trunk" mode, you must reconfigured all the switch ports where you want to connect the IAP.. In an architecture with controller, the AP may be in the any VLAN . You do not have to worry about roaming between vlans, trunk ports, VLANs too big ... In short, that as the network grows in size and / or complexity,
For example_ mesh points:
The deployment with instant AP, maybe you need create one, or two, or more mesh links. You can configure two mesh links over the same mesh portal, ( the maximum hop count is two nodes) (point >point >portal).
The deployment with controller , you can create 16 cluster of mesh portal with mesh points over two or more hops.
Instant or controller. depending on what we need, both are good solutions.
Bets regards!