SmartZone vs Cloud for MSP

[william_thousan]

We are moving our clients away from Ubiquiti to Ruckus and have so far gotten away with Unleashed, but as we move some of our bigger clients, I'm try to decided between installing a virtual SmartZone in our private cloud and use the vSZ-H multi-tenancy or pushing everyone to use the Ruckus Cloud.

I understand the Ruckus Cloud would have better redundancy and that the self-hosted would have much better cost control as we scale, but I can't seem to determine if there are any features or capabilities that are different when using the SmartZone vs Cloud.

Any insight would be very appreciated?

Thanks!

[abilashpr]

Dear William,

It purely depends upon the customer, Cloud is easy to manage and requires minimum user intervention as it is powered by AI so, troubleshooting and issue resolution would be clicks away.

In case of Smart Zone you can customise it according to your need, when you support a business model managing different customers like a Carrier I would go for a Smart Zone which I can host on my private cloud, VMware, Nutanix or any Virtualize environment with minimal initial cost providing N+1 Geo redundancy. If customers want AI powered Ruckus Analytics they have to bought as extra. In case of corporate customers who specially need to support their staff with WFH environment securely you just add a Data plane which can be added anywhere on the edge of customer's environment or at core where ever customer desires and you just have to ship the Access point. You get the flexibility and power to host a massive 10000 APs on a single node vsz and 30000 APs on an 4 node cluster with N+1 Geo-redundancy.  You install one controller once and just pay for AP license and AP and expand your customer base of course renew your support often just to get support when you get into trouble.

Smart Zone is a Carrier grade Network Management solution for Enterprise Market.

This is my two cents. Hope it helps!!!

Regards,

Abilash PR.

[william_thousan]

My thought was to deploy a single SmartZone in our private cloud and use it for all of our customers. Sounds like that should work.

So is it just the AI powered analytics you don't get with SmartZone?

[eightohtwoeleve]

You can still take advantage of the cloud analytics if you decide to go vSZ. It will just connect to Cloud Services under System -> General Settings.

[DarrelRhodes]

Hi William,

We would strenuously recommend you install 2x virtual SmartZone instances in a cluster configuration for N+1 resilience and automatic load-balancing of clients and managed APs and switches accross the cluster nodes. You only require a single license for each managed device as the cluster shares licenses for APs and switches. The only additional license you will require is the Right-to-Use license for the second vSZ.

Thanks,

Darrel.