Likelihood to Recommend Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches are well suited for data closets in today’s ever expanding network system requirements. Today’s businesses rely on stable, fast, and highly available data connectivity. Businesses perform at such a quick pace now and the need to consume data resources is an integral part of most every business function. There can no longer be outages. Slow data connectivity and sluggish system response is directly related to business success. The Cisco Catalyst platform has provided our company with a network foundation that is fast and reliable so that the business can concentrate on what they do best.
Read full review Cisco Meraki MS is brilliant in very simple environments where basic segregation is required. Many features are pre-configured as defaults and this makes it easy to configure security and stability features like STP protections and UDLD. It is capable of some more complex functions, such as dot1x authentication. TAC support is easy to access and usually timely. Bundling support into the license and making it available through Dashboard is great. We have had issues monitoring the Cisco Meraki Dashboard using legacy SNMP based system - this means we now effectively have one more network monitoring screen to watch. We also sorely lack an ageing timer for stick MAC address port security - essential in uncontrolled locations with no NAC available. We have also had issues with devices pulling DHCP leasing from the wrong VLAN on initial provisioning and then struggling to transition to our management VLAN when the full config is pulled.
Read full review Pros The Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches provide reliable connectivity for multiple client device types whether computers, phones, wireless access points, etc. The Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches has deployment flexibility from traditional IOS-XE deployments to Cisco Catalyst SD-Access and now Meraki monitored solutions. Multiple switch models allow us to customize each data closet deployment to exactly fit the port density and power-over-Ethernet requirements. Read full review Meraki MS switches are wonderful at allowing a network admin to configure a VPN mesh network without having to have highly specialized knowledge. Unlike Cisco switches, there is no CLI, there is only a GUI, and Meraki support helps you set it up as you add nodes to your network. Meraki MS switches are easy to deploy. Full stop. They can work with any firewall or ASA but I would strongly recommend using the Meraki MX security appliance if you are going to use Meraki MS switches because they were made to work together. They easily stack. It's all done for you in the Meraki cloud control panel. They will get an address from your admin VLAN's DHCP scope and keep it. Even if you unplug it and move it, you will not have to worry about addressing it. The GUI is online and you can reach it from anywhere, so as long as you have the credentials, you can manage the network from any device that has a browser. Read full review Cons Software needs improvement, where features are added (Stack wise) or removed (GLBP) without solicitation from a wider audience or depreciation, respectively Software bugs recently in basic features like AAA Ability to turn off all unused services or features to reduce the attack surface Cisco CoPP functionality is not like it was on the Cat 6k platform - users cannot create custom policies for use at the control-plane interface Read full review People who are coming from enterprise switches or command line options may feel limited If internet is having issue, managing the switches can become more burdensome Switches do not have as many advanced features as enterprise switches Delay in reporting and debugging Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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!)
Read full review Support Rating Cisco support for the Meraki products is great. I have a dedicated representative who I can reach out to at any time. They offer numerous online resources and easy to follow tutorials to help the most novice user feel like a pro. When I need support they were ready and quickly helped me solve my problems.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The Catalyst switches definitely have a more robust feature set than the Meraki switches but the Meraki switches are intended for a different use case than the Catalyst switches. We used Catalyst switches in our wiring closets because they fit in better with the topology and feature sets that we wanted to deploy.
Read full review Meraki MS provides the sweet spot between manageability and functionality, though not at a significantly lower cost. Desktop support engineers can manage it day-to-day and sometimes that is the most important factor, especially in our case, as a layer 2 switching solution that can also provide PoE to the
Meraki MR WAPs.
Read full review Scalability Cisco Meraki MS is intuitive and allows us to easily manage 340+ satellite locations and four corporate locations. Templates, intelligent patching, and alerting are fantastic. This has drastically improved compliance and managing such a large footprint. I would continually recommend Cisco Meraki MS for any multi-site organization because of its ease of use.
Read full review Return on Investment Don't need to buy services - lifetime warranty Stability - even 10 year old devices are still running and doing the job Sometimes lines of products are on the market for a very short time (eg. 6800 instant access) - it is hard to buy equipment to make the network bigger. Read full review We scaled out existing networks way faster and way easier. We have added new sites with new switch and network configuration requirements way faster and easier. Because Meraki switches integrate so seamlessly with Meraki Wi-Fi it makes Wi-Fi management very easy and very straightforward. Read full review ScreenShots