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To cloud or not to cloud the Zone Director?

unknown

Our ZD1100 and Aps are end of life. We are evaluating the refresh routes. The question we have is what are the pros and cons of using a virtual appliance zone director on-prem vs the cloud service?
Any input is greatly appreciated, thanks.

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unknown

I tried Unleashed vs. ZoneDirector. Unleashed was fine, but I felt like I was crippled from the ZD options. Sorry I cannot provide more info. as it's been awhile and I forget the details. I think if I had maybe 3-5 AP's I'd look more seriously at Unleashed. I'll also share that I moved to the zd1200 a couple years ago from an zd1100, the 1200 is much quicker and has less finicky issues.... could be code maturity but I'm guessing that newer faster hardware had lent a hand in performance and NO issues. My ZD1200's have been up for over a year with no issues, code 9.12 & 14 AP's.

unknown

What's a ballpark price on the "virtual appliance" ZD? We have 4 sites with physical ZDs and at some point it would make sense to consolidate. I imagine one advantage with something self-hosted is that you're not locked into paying a monthly fee in perpetuity... that's why we left Meraki.

unknown

@Bway NOC,

Don't mean to jack the topic but, it looks like I'm being forced into Meraki at my next refresh later this year. I've demo'ed the equipment and the higher end units seem to perform ok. I don't like the delay that cloud management brings when trying to make config. changes quickly but that's the biggest complaint I had other than the cost. Any advice or thoughts about Meraki?
Thanks

unknown

Thanks for sharing. I have not checked out anybody else for long time since Ruckus performed great for us since 2013. So we thought we stick with them.

unknown

Thanks for sharing

unknown

Thanks for sharing

unknown

said
reading your OP, i am not able to make out what are your current challenges (cost/architecture/) and what is your deployment type & ur expectations if u put some light on that, one can stich a solution based on various product line and then it would make sense for pro/cons discussion...that would really add value to your decision making process ...my 50 cents..

unknown

We have a zone director 1100 and ZF7372 access points. All are flagged End Of Life.
We would like to refresh our hardware. We were told we had the option between an on-prem virtual zone director and a cloud based. So the question I had is: what are the pros and cons of each to help us make an educated choice.

unknown

I have the same question. I'm looking to move offices and have an opportunity to change the setup. Current office is using a ZD1200 and 5 R710s. For variety of reasons I have a second office site which uses R510 Unleashed. There is also the option to use Cloud Ruckus. So I would also be interested to understand answers to:

- Tradeoffs of dedicated controller (ZD1200) vs Unleashed vs Cloud Ruckus

Things like the following seems to come to mind:

- overall performance of APs and any issues with latency of comms to master node (controller, Unleashed master or cloud)
- differences in resiliency - how do the options deal with failures of the APs, the controller or connectivity to Internet in case of cloud. Do they continue to operate? How do they recover?
- Licensing and costs of operation

Had good experience with ZD1200 and Unleashed appears to be working well.

michael_brado

Hello and great conversation topic.

All three options ZoneDirector local or central-office based, Unleashed, and Cloud Wi-Fi are designed to be flexible to our customer needs per the size of your home/business and the network architecture (ie Unleashed is single LAN), versus multiple site support. SmartZone and virtual SmartZone add even more possible deployment options. Licensing is available for min/max number of access points.

Our 802.11ac Wave 1 and Wave 2 APs are all still in future support plans, only legacy model b/g/a/n only APs, which lack the hw/mem to support newer features/functions have been "retired".
[ Said, you have the option of using ZD1100/7372 APs on last release code for a couple more years... but updating your hw is "recommended" for future support. ]

The ZD3000/ZD1200 appliances offer great centralized wifi network management, and all the features/functions that we've been migrating to the SmartZone platform, which is our future facing OS.

The Cloud platform is a little different, where Customers don't have direct SSH/WebUI to the controllers or AP for CLI commands. This platform has a different look/feel for monitoring/event reporting/etc.

Regarding Resiliency, ZD/SZ managed APs that lose network connectivity willl attempt to reconnect and have a Recovery mode if Mesh APs get stranded. They will continue to provide local network resources (printers, etc) on a PSK WLAN, but need AAA/RADIUS or WebAuth to go thru the controller (down if WAN not working).

The Unleashed platform is designed for Member APs to take over Master AP functions (except if used in Gateway mode, when manual replacement would be necessary).

We invite customers considering the migration from older ZD/AP platforms to contact their local VAR or Ruckus systems engineers for more specific design assistance.

evan_fernandes

Very informative forum... Thank you.

Evan

unknown

"The Cloud platform is a little different, where Customers don't have direct SSH/WebUI to the controllers or AP for CLI commands. This platform has a different look/feel for monitoring/event reporting/etc."

Michael,
Does this mean limited control over operations/optimizations compared to ZD in some ways?

Soheyb

michael_brado

Only that you cannot directly contact your APs via SSH like you may have done under other than our Cloud Wi-Fi platform.

charles_sprick1

Here's a real-world example... Some guest wifi portals ask for a config change that is currently set via ssh. What would the equivalent of this be when using the cloud-hosted version?

enable
config
no hotspot_redirect_https
wlan "Guest Wi-Fi"
called-station-id-type ap-mac
end