Meraki

[shillings]

I've deliberately not posted this under the wireless section, as I want to try and understand more about Meraki in relation to the campus LAN.

Does anyone have any Meraki experience, particularly around their switches and firewalls?

I'm trying to understand how big a threat they are to Cisco's existing campus LAN non-wireless products - i.e. Catalyst switches, ASA firewalls, ISE, etc etc.

I know Cisco is pitching Meraki at the SMB space, but do their products scale well beyond that?

I presume they lack the depth of IOS features, but how far off are they?

Hoping to learn more over the next few weeks, but any forum knowledge/insight would be useful beforehand, even if it helps me ask the right questions.

[shillings]

So, I've heard the Meraki message, which unsurprisingly sounds fabulous. There's good margin, very few SKUs, nice GUI and easy access to lots of great features, seems to scale way beyond the SMB market too (despite Cisco positioning it there), and cheaper than traditional Cisco products, etc etc

But, what is the experience of forum users? Must be some folks worked with this kit. I know one end-user that wasn't too impressed and decided not to proceed, but that's it.

Is no one concerned about the fact Meraki configure this kit and send it out to the customer? What do all the field engineers out there think? OK, so I'm sure some engieering services will be required (obviously a wireless site survey), but it appears to offer a very different future to what we have in place now.

[SamirD]

I have Cisco rv series products.  I have Meraki OD2 series products. 

I've looked into using Meraki for the whole network, but their strength is their APs, not their backend imo.  They pitch themselves against Sonicwall and some Cisco products, and the price range is higher than the Cisco rv series.  They're just another player in the space.  If they ever get rid of their APs, they'll die.  Their newer products aren't anything groundbreaking like their APs are.

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[shillings]

Thanks Samir - great to get some feedback. How have you found the provisioning process and support?

[SamirD]

Because I use just the Meraki OD2, there's not much configuration at all on these things.  Simply set them up in the cloud and put them in place.  The one thing I've learned how to do (that Meraki doesn't official support) is creating wired hops.  This allows the OD2s to have full 11Mb speeds between each other vs 5Mb.  It also makes switching from one gateway to another one in less than one ping .  This is the most fault tolerant setup I've seen for a simple public multi-wan wifi network.  But you can't do much more with them, like port forwarding or other traditional routing configurations.

I've spoke with their support a couple of times on the OD2 diagnosing one that went bad, discussing the theory on their mesh system, and inquiring about their MX series.  I think their support is one of their best features.  In this day and age, it's pretty top notch.

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[Bilal Nawaz · Accepted solution]

I had a Meraki switch and still have an AP - they really are amazing products. Both are application aware and you can police to layer 7 type protocols with excellent QoS capabilities plus much more - device + user tracking, 802.1x, user profiling etc.... All managed from a centralized platform.

My experience with the support has been excellent, and had a technical engineer help me set up and install.

Its very user friendly and extremely easy to manage.

(tbh I haven't touched the AP or switch since it was installed)

One of the things I did like was the automatic upgrades they push out, a bit like updating IOS but at scheduled times. (Which you can change, they do email out informing about the upgrade).

Cisco have acquired Meraki as you may know, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some of Meraki capabilities come in to Cisco's portfolio

However, I don't think I would consider replacing Catalyst switches for Meraki due to wide range of knowledge and experience people out there have of Cisco. Not everyone has heard of Meraki. And Cisco's infrastructure has been trial, tested and verified by some of the largest organizations in the world.

I agree with Samir, their AP's are probably their strongest products.

Hope this helps

Please rate useful posts and remember to mark any solved questions as answered. Thank you.

[shillings]

Thanks Bill. Very helpful. I'm trying to build a clearer picture of how their products might impact Cisco's own product lines. Particularly interesting that you don't see Meraki as a rival for traditional Catalyst products at this time.

You're probably right and Cisco is likely to implement some of their features, but the overall approach is still so very different - i.e. renting the kit including support contract (with no upfront cost) verses the traditional approach.

I guess we just have to wait and see.

[SamirD · Accepted solution]

I think it's because they're so different that Cisco made a very wise decision in acquiring them.  I actually own quite a bit of Cisco stock in addition to buying the products.  Cisco's tried and tested melting with Meraki's new and innovating approach can take the whole industry to a new level, but there will be a lot of growing pains from the process.  I just hope those Meraki OD2s stay around forever.  They replaced a host of APs that were deployed and had issues every few months.  Now, everything just hums along like a sewing machine and I get a text message the second something doesn't--very sharp system for the cost.

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