A lot of sysadmins I've talked with love Aruba products. I've always thought their products cost too much money, but the wifi setups that I deal with max out at 20 concurrent users in a single location.

I've worked with them quite a bit. The controller/lightweight AP setups they have are by far the best, Cisco's is a horrible stack of kinda working (imagine massively giant event where the cisco controllers are having cascading failures causing the controllers to reboot from too many clients associated to the LWAPs). However, last time I worked with the Aruba's, every model of controller supposedly had the same SNMP MIB but with tiny differences in the enterprise tables that made automatic data collection and management a pain in the ass. However, it's hard to beat IOS if you're configuring by hand or script and Cisco's standalone APs are still some of the best if you get the right antennas for your environment. If you want to know more about the situations they were used in (or most other brands of APs that exist), feel free to shoot me an email.

How does Aruba's AP compare to Ruckus Wireless ? Does anybody know what their pricing is ?

For a 5000 sq.ft office, would people recommend Aruba/Ruckus or a couple of cheap DLink/Buffalo wifi routers running WDS ?

We have a few at the office. I've never noticed any network issues and we have a good 20 geeks all in the same room often streaming video. Each with multiple wifi devices.

In addition our net admin swears by them. Thinks they are the best thing since sliced bread.