Case Study: Palo Alto Unified School District achieves unified, high-performance Gigabit Wi‑Fi and zero daily complaints with HPE Aruba Networking

Aruba Wave 2 Gigabit Wi-Fi with AOS 8, ClearPass and AirWave enables academic excellence

Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD), a top-ranked California district serving about 12,500 students across 18 campuses, faced a widening gap between growing BYOD/district-issued device counts and an aging, support-poor wireless system. With a small IT team and a decentralized environment that required separate management for each site, the district struggled with frequent user complaints, limited visibility, and inefficient administration.

PAUSD deployed Aruba’s Gigabit Wi‑Fi solution—802.11ac Wave 2 APs, 7200 controllers, ArubaOS 8 with Mobility Master, ClearPass and AirWave—to unify and centralize its WLAN. The result: a single manageable network across all campuses, role-based security and visibility, zero daily Wi‑Fi complaints, live in‑service upgrades to eliminate downtime, and reliable performance for roughly 12,000 daily devices (scalable to 50,000), while enabling future self‑service IoT onboarding.

Palo Alto Unified School District

Derek Moore

CTO