Alcatel-Lucent provides the OmniSwitch family of switches, providing data center switching, Ethernet & LAN switches, support for IoT and edge solutions, SDN, ruggedization and industrial-grade solutions, and WebSmart switches.
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Cisco Meraki MS
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Cisco offers the Meraki brand of Ethernet switches.
Our data management depends on the networking infrastructure and this product has provided all tools that are required. Our IT operations have been stable due to reliable security and networking services enhanced by this product. It easily identifies critical missions that may affect our operations and notify the service team for immediate action. My marketing department has discovered the most effective marketing channels that can attract more customers through a reliable internet connection.
Cisco Meraki MS suits a lot of environments, it can be connected to all kinds of vendors, but the scenario that will give you more control and visibility of your network is if you have more Meraki solutions to use and admin all from the dashboard. But if you only use Cisco Meraki MS you can also have all the functions and features from the switch, using in most of the cases as access layer.
I think when it comes to the Meraki products, it's just the ease of use and ease of troubleshooting because it's all cloud-based, easy to access from anywhere I can literally get on now and troubleshoot. So I think it's just the ease of use, which is great.
I think it may be fixed now, but for a long time, there was no equivalent of "show version" to see the exact uptime of a switch. This led to questions from upper management sometimes like "when was this device last rebooted?" and there was no way to answer if it had been longer than 3 months.
Sometimes there are somewhat "generic" errors on the Dashboard when looking at devices (those yellow error messages like DHCP error). If the error messages were a little bit more detailed it could go a long way into troubleshooting issues faster.
Being on the cloud its very easy to manage. We have layer 7 visibility and Cisco has introduced stackable MX switches which is even better! The Meraki portal can be accessed via SSO which is important to my organization (although it was a bit difficult to get that implemented initially!)
Like said before - I think there are better solutions in the market to solve the challenge rather than a physical appliance. Functionalities are there and capabilities are available, but, in my experience, they lack the inherent capacity a cloud solutions provides. Lacking on the capacity to have the flexibility and dynamic growth Cloud platforms enable.
Meraki support is excellent. They are also highly proactive. They literally replaced all of a particular model of our MS switches when it was discovered that they were not sure about the longevity of a particular chassis fan inside those switches. Without us having to do anything other than ask, they shipped us all new replacements (with a better fan in them) for the 10 or so of the switches that were in the affected model group, and we shipped the defective ones back to them int he same packaging, prepaid. None of the recalled switches had ever experienced a fan failure, but they were not willing to let them run in a production environment. I like that. Meraki MS support staff are also quick to get back to you and very knowledgeable about their product. I actually contact our Meraki rep to instigate a support case (although i could call support directly), and he gets the details from me first, then opens the ticket for us and explains it to support. This means that I only even need to talk to one person, and I like that, too. Meraki MS switches are designed to be essentially "plug and play", so support is generally not needed unless the end user is not following the deployment and operation guides
Most problems that face our company has been solved by an effective performance of this product. The operation and continuity of our business programs are boosted by great network connections. Alcatel company has been helpful in providing training and development guidelines where possible. The system performance has built a powerful operation base that can identify and provide solutions to business challenges. The digital working base for all our plans has been implemented.
Well, we've been using it for quite a number of years, so I guess I have evaluated, this is on the wireless side, the Ruckus platform, and it did not compare to the Cisco Meraki dashboard as far as the way it is utilized.
I would say probably eight. I think there's a lot of, the scalability is very nice and I've definitely deployed a lot of sites quickly. I think for us right now that we have to pivot away from manual configurations and using automated configurations. And so just being sure we prevent things like drift between sites is kind of important right now for us. And so I think that's the next steps for us in that product. And so I think if there was better documentation or better best practices about how to automate and deploy standardized, I think that would help.