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Question about Meraki vs. Aruba for a 30-store rollout
I'm wrapping up a network upgrade for a local retail chain here in Portland, 30 locations. Had to pick between Meraki and Aruba Instant for the APs and switches. I leaned Meraki for the cloud management simplicity but the recurring license costs scared me off. Ended up going with Aruba and so far the stability has been solid, but the initial config was more hands-on than I expected. Anyone else deal with this choice for a multi-site deployment?
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wadeowens1mo ago
nah but see the thing with meraki is you're paying for time you don't have. i manage 45 sites on meraki and the license cost is whatever when you figure in zero touch deployment. i can ship a switch to a new store, the manager plugs it in, and it just works off the cloud config. no sshing into boxes, no template syncs breaking when firmware updates drop. aruba's instant on is cool until you need to troubleshoot a weird dhcp issue at 11pm and realize the cloud dashboard is way less full featured than meraki's. and that "no recurring fee" argument falls apart when you factor in how much faster meraki gets new features pushed. we got wifi 6e support on existing hardware same week the firmware dropped. aruba users waited like 6 months for that.
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the initial config was more hands-on than I expected" - yeah that's the tradeoff with Aruba for sure. I did a similar rollout for a buddy's 15 location restaurant group and honestly the upfront work paid off big time. Once you get the templates dialed in and push them out via the cloud controller, subsequent sites go way smoother. We had a few hiccups with VLAN mapping across different switch models, but Aruba support was actually decent when we called in. The thing that sealed it for me over Meraki was no recurring ransom fee every year, especially when margins are tight on a retail buildout. Just make sure you really plan your SSID structure and guest portal stuff before you start cloning configs, because fixing it later across 30 sites is a headache.
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