Cisco 1000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 1000)
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Cisco 1000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 1000) provides software-defined WAN and integrated security features.
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Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is a software-defined WAN offering transport independence, application optimization, intelligent path control, and secure connectivity.
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Pricing
Cisco 1000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 1000)
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco 1000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 1000)
Cisco 1000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 1000)
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
This is effective for businesses who need a network solution that works more or less out of the box, without having to coordinate multiple additional devices in the configuration process. Correspondingly, users with needs for more advanced functionality or configurability, or modification may benefit from a different model or different product line.
So well suited, if you look at operations that have say sorry, facilities or locations that have around up to around a thousand employees or like some of our diverse manufacturing facilities that have smaller amounts of bandwidth that have high uptime requirements, the system is very flexible with regards to how fault tolerance is addressed, how redundancy is built that allows us to accommodate those needs. It has some nice built-in security features that allow us also to be able to adapt to different conditions. The problem we struggle with it the same time though, is that when you activate some of those other more feature capabilities, the throughput of the platform begins to drop fairly significantly. So if you add too many security features or too many other features onto it, you try to put in a bigger and bigger device in order to accommodate the same amount of throughput that you need. And, what happens then is that the overall cost now becomes prohibitive and it's no longer desirable to be deployed. There are other options that are better. The other side is that when you pass a certain amount of total throughput, so if we have campuses or larger locations that may have 5,000, 6,000 employees at them the size of the device, again, that's needed to be able to do that becomes cost prohibitive to do it. So again, that benefit that we're looking for, it seems to have a sweet spot, right? That's like between 10 megabits and one gigabit. And we don't really seem to have a good solution in the platform to address some of the other ones for us right now. Thankfully, those level of ones are very small. We don't have that many occurrences of really high throughput requirements, but we do see that in the future growing. So we're certainly looking for options for how to address those.
The core of the product itself architectural-wise is designed very well for scale. So from the backend, for example, the ability to support a large number of diversified locations and a flexibility in on topology and how those can be deployed.
Bosch has a very complex kind of a deployment where how its remote sites around the world are connected. We have well over 1200 locations in our wholly-owned operations. And those are deployed in regions, I mean, literally all around the world. So for us to be able to be flexible in how the topology of those sites are deployed was fairly significant.
Right now in the ASR nine twenties, we're having an issue with its shooting out power adapter errors when there really isn't any. And we're not really sure we're working with Cisco Tex to see if it's a bug and if there's a bug fix.
I would rate these routers useability as 9/10 - I've designed and deployed Cisco solutions for the last 20 or so years, so, therefore, know what I am buying and try to get an understanding of the capabilities before deploying. The Cisco 1000 series Integrated Service Router is a rock-solid investment with great throughput "out of the box".
With any Cisco product, you are very well supported by the Technical Assistance Centre (TAC). This is one of the major plus points when selecting Cisco networking products - working in IT for the last 20years you soon appreciate that it is impossible to know everything and that there are people within Cisco you can lean-on when you need assistance.
Fast and efficient. The only issue currently is that the support is only overseas support and not in South Africa, which causes delays in resolution for some cases. Escalating issues is quite simple and the opening of new cases from the dashboard is easy. I have never had a support issue that could not be resolved.
We have used DLink and Fortinet Routers. I find Cisco superior in management, reliability and overall network performance over the two. I will say Fortinet has not experienced any failures and does provide very similar functionality, I simply find Cisco to be my preferred Router hardware. I further base this on support. When things go wrong and they often can in networking, they Support team is excellent in helping identify and resolve the issue quickly
The Sonic wall and Cisco ASA required a lot of trial and error to get up and running. Rules and configurations were difficult to setup and were not intuative. Meraki is very ituative.
Once your template is set up Meraki is easy to scale. Even creating the template is easy and I was able to learn enough in 4 hours to build, test, and deploy templates for our locations. Best part is you can stage your deployment by adding a unit to a template even before taking it out of the box.
