Hello!
We need to refresh all our access switches for 120 remote sites. They currently have a mix of SG200 and SG300. We also have 5 bigger sites that have C2960X stacked. We talk about 10-100 users for small sites and 200-250 for the 5 bigger sites.
We are a very small team so the deployment must be simple. They all have 2 VLANs, one for company devices (laptops, PC's, printers, RF scanners, etc.) and the other for Internet only access (Guests, BYOD, IoT). We are also currently deploying 802.1X with Cisco ISE across the board.
They have Meraki firewalls with SD-WAN and Meraki access points.
Meraki is very simple to manage with the Dashboard and the API. It gives us very good visibility all around in a simple way.
We did a refresh 2 years ago for 30 local sites and went with the 9200L. We got the DNA appliance included. Deployment was pretty long as we needed to unbox every switches to put at least the branch IP + SSH before shipping them. DNA was not deployed at that time. Today it is and all our 9200L are in there. I'm probably not using DNA to his full potential (no SDA fabric) but I find Meraki to give us better visibility and config management. Deploying 802.1X is a real pain with the C9200L. The config with IBSN 2.0 is so complicated. With Meraki it's like a couple clicks and you're done. Especially with the API it's very easy to make changes across all our sites. I didn't have time to play around with DNA but I guess there are some ways to automate the deployment and 802.1X. I still find Meraki easier.
Anyways I'm leaning towards Meraki switches. We already have the firewalls and the WiFi so adding Meraki switches makes sense to me. Also the deployment will be easier as we can configure the dashboard remotely. We'll just have to ship the switches and that's it. I would make 1 or 2 stacks depending on the size of the branch and connect them to the MX firewalls. I would go PoE for the APs and cameras.
Thoughts?
Thank you all!
