Cisco Vs Ruckus Wireless Systems

There is always a great tussle between Cisco and Ruckus on the wireless upfront where both the vendors are working hard to grip the market with the features they are providing in their wireless domain. Today I am going to talk about the head to head discussion of Cisco and Ruckus, Although  there are lot of point which i am not going to cover here in this discussion.

Ruckus Wireless:

Ruckus wireless controllers address deployments of any size i.e. from a very small Field Sales Office to a Managed Service Provider solution. Clustered SCG 200s offer one of the highest scalability levels and are available in an appliance form factor as well as a virtual controller. EMS functions are built-in and integration via REST API is supported.

Full range of wireless controllers scaling from the entry level ZoneDirector 1200 which supports up to 75 AP’s, all the way up to the SmartCellTM Gateway controller which, with available clustering support, is capable of managing tens of thousands of AP’s and providing access for hundreds of thousands of mobile devices 

Virtual SmartZone
High Scale (vSZ-H) - up to10,000 APs, up to 100,000 clients
vSZ-H cluster of 4 - up to 30,000 Aps, up to 300,000 clients 

ZoneDirector Controllers 
ZoneDirector 1200 – up to 75 Aps, 2000 clients
ZoneDirector 3000 – up to 500 Aps, 10000 clients
ZoneDirector 5000 – up to 1000 APs, 20000 clients 

SmartZone 100 – up to 1024 Aps, 25000 clients 

Ruckus ZoneFlex 

• Easy to setup, manage, optimize, and upgrade 
• ZoneDirector appliance(s) are both scalable and cost effective 
• Designed for distributed data, but enables tunneling as needed (guests, voice, L3 mobility) 
• Industry-leading features (BeamFlex, Zero-IT,  DPSK, ChannelFly, SmartMesh, SmartCast) 

Fig 1.1- Ruckus ZoneFlex Architecture

Ruckus SmartCell Architecture 

• Ultra scalable SCG clusters support tens of thousands of APs 
• Fully redundant management, control, and data planes with failover/handoff; distributed AP operation if SCG cluster is unreachable 
• Flexible distributed or centralized data path, including multiple “northbound” options: L2/L3 over GRE, 1Q VLAN, 3G/4G packet gateways 
• Intuitive zone-based AP setup and configuration  and Multi-tenant framework for managed services 

Fig 1.2- Ruckus Smart Cell Architecture

Cisco Wireless
Cisco has wide range of wireless controllers and large selection of network routing and switching products, in combination there are additional options for converged access solutions as well as for plug-in modules. Following that path may lock customers to the hardware and features specific to the Cisco switches and complicate infrastructure upgrades in the future. 

Extensive range of standalone controllers, controller modules for network switches, virtual controllers, converged access switches with integrated wireless controllers 

Controllers with Central switching and FlexConnect 

Cisco 5760 - 1000 APs, 12000 clients Cisco 5500 – 500 APs, 7000 clients Cisco 2500 – up to 75 APs, 1000 clients Controller Modules:
ISR G2 – up to 200 APs, 3000 clients
WiSM2 – up to 1000 APs, 15000 clients

FlexConnect Mode capable:
Flex 7500 – 6000 APs, 64000 clients 

Virtual 
Virtual Wireless Controller – 200 APs, 6000 clients Converged Access Switches 

Catalyst 3650 Series - 25 APs, 1000 clients
Catalyst 3850 Series - 50 APs, 2000 clients

Cisco AireOS 

• Fully centralized data path; potential bottleneck and leads to greater need for redundancy 
• More expensive to scale for next-gen speeds
• AP modes are static and sacrifice flexibility (mesh, FlexConnect, local, spectrum, etc.) 

Fig 1.3- Cisco AireOS Architecture

Cisco IOS Converged Access 

• New Cisco architecture with goal of converging with IOS operating system and framework 
• Immature solution development, lacking many features of AireOS and Ruckus solutions 
• Excellent management options with primitive GUI and excellent support by Prime 
• Fractured architecture requires multiple control points for scale, mobility, RRM 
• Unnecessarily weds Wi-Fi/Ethernet, promotes vendor lock, forces tradeoffs in upgrade cycles 

Fig 1.4- Cisco IOS Converged Access Architecture

Below are the some of the feature difference between Ruckus and Cisco Wireless systems. Click on the image to have the better view.

Fig 1.5- Cisco Vs Ruckus Wireless