topic Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps? in To Be Moved

Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

bradey_malloy — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 02:45:29 GMT

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

monnat_systems — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 05:48:12 GMT

they already have one which is highly and easily scalable to 100's of ap's..

Take a look at Vscg on their website...

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

bradey_malloy — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 15:28:33 GMT

I understand Vscg to be a VM that needs to be installed on a hypervisor within your onsite or in-cloud datacenter. I'm looking for a true cloud managed solution that resides on the ruckus cloud.

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

bradey_malloy — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 15:35:01 GMT

I'm looking for a true cloud managed product like unleashed but, I need it to scale to more than the 25 AP limit of unleashed.

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

seanmuir — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 22:00:00 GMT

Unleashed is not Cloud based infrastructure, it is a controllerless autonomous network.

Cloud based WiFi requires a server to manage the AP's, the server in this instance can be either physical or virtual i.e. SCG or vSCG.

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

bradey_malloy — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 22:15:36 GMT

Thanks for that info....I see now that unleashed is controllerless but not "cloud managed." I'm not seeing any type of cloud managed wireless solutions from Ruckus besides the Xclaim product. Ruckus, can we expect an enterprise level, cloud managed, solution in 2016?

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

seanmuir — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:28:34 GMT

Why would you want to run an enterprise network via a cloud managed service which you don't have full control off?

Also why are you not interested in vSCG? is it a cost related issue?

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

bradey_malloy — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:35:42 GMT

Cloud managed wifi is still controlled as it is with an on premise controller. The only difference is that the management traffic is tunneled to the cloud controller. This method produces many benefits....no large upfront controller costs, no controller upgrades, no power requirements, HA is handled in the cloud, limited management. Branch sites can be preconfigured in the cloud controller. I could go on and on.

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

bradey_malloy — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:39:04 GMT

All that said, cloud managed wifi must offer all or most of the features that on premise controllers offer. If they can not offer the same feature set, then I agree that on premise is still the best solution

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

seanmuir — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 09:19:13 GMT

I am well aware of the benefits of cloud based architecture and Cloud managed WiFi is fine, but not in an enterprise environment when your network is hosted by a 3rd party, I have one word... Security!

I can't see why you would be prepared to pass on you network certifcates/login credentials to a 3rd party to manage unless you want to use the Cloud as a proxy and still have your own server farm for auth (which kinda defeats the object, as if you already have a server farm then you might as well spin up a vSCG), but you're clearly not thinking that, as you want to tunnel all the traffic back to the Cloud to breakout.

Tunnelling traffic is fine for breakout, but you would need a local data plane in this solution as the hike in client traffic being tunneled would have an detrimental effect on the core network if it were cloud based and broken out at the Cloud core. This would obviously mean that the cost of the core network would escalate and be passed on to the end user.

You talked about controller upgrades - you would still be hit by outages when the 3rd Party decided to upgrade. Have you thought about being able to get multiple different companies to agree on outage times, I would imagine that would be a nightmare as you have no control (you would have to have a Cloud based core in every time region for this to be feasible).

What if you discovered a bug, how would you troubleshoot and how could you roll back if the firmware was having an effect on your network config?

The list goes on, but I would say there is a lot to think about when it comes to Cloud based enterprise WiFi when it comes to a 3rd party running it.

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

bradey_malloy — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 13:43:30 GMT

A few misconceptions, client traffic is not tunneled, only management traffic. Client traffic is sent straight to the internet just as it is in controller architecture. There is no outage during cloud based controller upgrades for 2 reasons : HA is handled in the cloud (redundancy in the cloud) and the APs can function normally if the controller is unreachable. The only time the controller should become unreachable would be during an Internet outage, in my invionment, Internet outages bring 100 percent of users to a halt because we are fully utilizing cloud based storage and applications. Having access to a wifi connection during an Internet outage is utterly useless to me. If I lose my Internet service, my clients lose all productivity, no matter where the controller is located. About your bug scenario, I understand your concern here. I guess we just have to believe our provider thoroughly tests all upgrades before deploying them. Authentication already takes place in the cloud for our users via Google apps credentials.

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

monnat_systems — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 18:38:35 GMT

Major Ruckus distributor / VAR are providing true cloud managed solution powered by Ruckus Vscg which is available globally...

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

bradey_malloy — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 18:42:07 GMT

Great, I'll look in to that. I appreciate it!

Re: Will Ruckus soon offer a Cloud managed solution allowing for more than 25 aps?

seanmuir — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 22:02:33 GMT

You can tunnel client data traffic to a controller so that its centrally broken out as opposed to local breakout at the AP, I just didn't read your post correctly or I wouldn't even have commented 🙂

You can also configure on current Ruckus roadmap to have the AP's stop broadcasting the SSID if it can't see the gateway i.e. router is down

Note: I have personally asked this value to be change to accomodate a configurable address, as the gateway can be up, but there is no internet, as the gateway in most conditions is this router.

If you think that vendors QA cover all funtionality then dont be thinking this at all as you will be opening yourself up for a fall!

If you are using Google login credentials using OAuth are you not concerned that these email accounts are hosted on a server you have no control over?

In regards to your comment:

There is no outage during cloud based controller upgrades for 2 reasons : HA is handled in the cloud (redundancy in the cloud) and the APs can function normally if the controller is unreachable.

This is not entirely true as MESH networks for example are affected and there are others impacts you would need to think about.