While I understand that in the world of Enterprise IT it is standard to use a package from one of the large vendors complete with controller, I very much disagree with philosophy of setting things up that way. Please note that my network is not to the scale of yours, only about 75 APs on a small campus, but I've had great luck using small-business/high-end consumer grade equipment, clever setups on "Fat" APs, and some powerful controller software.
For example, my current design just uses off-the shelf EnGenius stuff because it was cheap and at least did 2.4N piped through a communications-isloated vLAN and uses pfSense as a gateway so I can do my shaping and captive portal. I mean at $90 per AP and zero licensing costs, I'm willing to double-up on density to offset for slightly lower quality parts and we still make out like bandits in our budget. Throw in some basic scripts to check on AP status and you really have 95% of what Cisco or Aruba does, but at 5% of the cost.
I understand that beyond a certain scale this just isn't feasible, probably around the 150+ mark. But "large-scale" means different things to different people and the author didn't provide a rough AP count. Besides, I had Cisco drop off some gear for me to test out their 1142s and a controller a year or so back. I was less than impressed compared to what my system was already doing. Only hitch being that I had to manually configure each AP, but its all about balancing practial usage against budgets in my world. And my Aruba rep was creepy.
Final note - please bear in mind that while we have opted for this solution for wireless, the actual infrastructure is top notch. No copper used in between buildings, 1Gbps minimum fiber and 10G fiber from our Core router the server room. I think a lot of the time a high-cost wireless solution is designed as such to offset the downsides of a poorly designed or outdated network. Spend money on your foundation first, you know?
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While I understand that in the world of Enterprise IT it is standard to use a package from one of the large vendors complete with controller, I very much disagree with philosophy of setting things up that way. Please note that my network is not to the scale of yours, only about 75 APs on a small campus, but I've had great luck using small-business/high-end consumer grade equipment, clever setups on "Fat" APs, and some powerful controller software. For example, my current design just uses off-the shelf EnGenius stuff because it was cheap and at least did 2.4N piped through a communications-isloated vLAN and uses pfSense as a gateway so I can do my shaping and captive portal. I mean at $90 per AP and zero licensing costs, I'm willing to double-up on density to offset for slightly lower quality parts and we still make out like bandits in our budget. Throw in some basic scripts to check on AP status and you really have 95% of what Cisco or Aruba does, but at 5% of the cost. I understand that beyond a certain scale this just isn't feasible, probably around the 150+ mark. But "large-scale" means different things to different people and the author didn't provide a rough AP count. Besides, I had Cisco drop off some gear for me to test out their 1142s and a controller a year or so back. I was less than impressed compared to what my system was already doing. Only hitch being that I had to manually configure each AP, but its all about balancing practial usage against budgets in my world. And my Aruba rep was creepy. Final note - please bear in mind that while we have opted for this solution for wireless, the actual infrastructure is top notch. No copper used in between buildings, 1Gbps minimum fiber and 10G fiber from our Core router the server room. I think a lot of the time a high-cost wireless solution is designed as such to offset the downsides of a poorly designed or outdated network. Spend money on your foundation first, you know?