Cisco Catalyst Center delivers a comprehensive, software-defined approach to managing enterprise networks. It simplifies operations by integrating automation, real-time monitoring, security policies, and advanced analytics into a single interface. Designed to support complex networking environments, Catalyst Center optimizes efficiency, enhances security, and ensures seamless connectivity across wired and wireless infrastructures.
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Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Cisco's Meraki MR Series is a wireless LAN solution.
Meraki for the easier choice. Lately Meraki have climbed up the ladder with the new MS390 widening the offer. For me I see Meraki for the small/mid market customer and Cisco Classic more for the bigger customer with more specific needs. But security must follow along with the …
It is not appropriate as a source of Truth. Templates don't give me enough automation capablities to want to use them for Day-N configuration changes. I'd rather run a simple SolarWinds job or look at doing something more complex with other tools and stacks (e.g. Python, Ansible, etc.) I'm not sure what Cisco Catalyst Center is supposed to be used for. The name suggests it should be the application I go to for managing all my Catalyst devices, but instead it feels like I'm always fighting the tool and it's easier to do tasks with some other more specialized tool. The software feels like it was designed by software engineer, but not network engineers.
The Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points is a good solution although not for everyone. Cost wise it is more expensive than competition. Technically speaking, if you are going for a full Cisco Meraki solution from firewall, switches, WAP, and management app, it requires a solid technical understanding of where each part and piece falls. If you have the money and the technical capabilities (in house or outsourced) then it is a solid platform that leans on Cisco's respectable history in the communications and infrastructure industry.
That's a good one. Because its power is only exceeded by its mystery, it makes our life easy. Prior to having Cisco Catalyst Center in place, a simple change, a simple change to put a network out into service, each of a building might have taken hours or days worth of change planning. Now it takes us longer to raise the paperwork, run it, and go through a change board process and it does to execute the intent and turn it into an actionable service.
It's cloud based, so as long as we have an internet connection, we can access it. Whenever we push a change, it's one stop like a single pane of glass to manage all our equipment. And so that's what I liked about it.
Kind of just like what I just covered where pushing out the configuration, it can be a little bit tedious to go through those steps to apply the template to a network profile and then apply that network profile to a group of switches at a specific site where I want to make a change, and I'm looking at this as more of a, it's a small change where I feel like the switch profiles in the network profiles are more of a grand template for the entire switch. Where I'm going testing, I'm just trying to make a minor adjustment to one little configuration, it becomes a little bit tedious.
So the Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points dashboard, it's a little bit like comparing Apple and Android. So with Android you can do a lot more configuration, whereas with Meraki there are a lot of assumptions about a radio resource management. There are a lot of assumptions around, for instance, when it does a heat map, it's a heat map, which is a population density rather than a wireless coverage heat map. So that can cause confusion because normally when you look at heat map, you're looking at, that is a metric for how well it's performing rather than how many devices are using it. So I think that's always at the bone of contention around one of the things it can do.
The first impressions using the tool, led us to believe that it will be very helpful going forward. There's a lot of potential to implement other features in the network
It is a solution that works very well. It is almost like setup and forget, since the solution works. When issues occur, documentation is available with detailed steps on how to solve this problems you are facing, of course Technical Support is always ready to help. We have had instances where an Access Point fails and within 2 days we have the replacement
Cisco DNA Center is going to help us in security, simplicity and ease of administration. Cisco DNA Center is complete management and control platform that simplifies and streamlines network operations. Cisco DNA Center offers a single dashboard for every core function in your network. With this platform, IT can become more nimble and respond to changes and challenges faster and more intelligently.
To get basic functionality doesn't take long. Set up a new Meraki Dashboard activate the licenses and get internet connection for the APs and you are more or less done. The Dashboard will find your items and you're good to go.
El soporte de CISCO DNA Center es muy bueno, responden a mis dudas pero no he tenido oportunidad de reportar un incidente o determinar un tiempo de respuesta critico. The support of CISCO DNA Center is very good, they answer my questions, but I have not had the opportunity to report an incident or determine a critical response time.
We have not had any issues with the Meraki WiFi Access Point hardware but we did encounter a problem with a Meraki LAN switch that failed to power up. Upon a email into the Meraki Support, they promptly called back and we went over some quick tests to determine a power supply problem. A replacement LAN switch was sent to me the next day.
It was informative, but the labs were not available long enough for us to get intimately familiar with CCNA before it was closed. The course instructor was well informed and got us as close to ready as she could.
There were documents that detailed how the WiFi Access Point was to be installed and mounted. The only issue was to cable the device, we use a third party for this type of work and typically has to be performed after normal business hours. Other than that, the installation was easy.
It did a lot of good things for us. But the capabilities that we used it for were just probably a lot of what we're using it for right now, which is upgrades and configuration pushes to all of our gear, but it doesn't have quite the robust features that I've learned about this week. So as far, I'm still pretty new in the network world. I've only been doing the job for seven years, so I've really only known Cisco products and I haven't reviewed anything outside of Cisco, but just from what I've worked on and they've all done what I've needed them to do. And with Catalyst Center it'll do even more
We were more on a Cisco Wireless Controller set up, which takes a lot longer to control and that's why we've actually gone through a cloud-based product, which is very easy compared with the old traditional way that we used to have. It's more ease of software. They've got very similar features, but it's easy to set up and maintain into the future.
As far as I know, it's 10. I mean, because like I said, I manage stuff in the south. I have coworkers that manage it in the north. And so the scalability of it to be able to be go in and see the configurations of the ones in the north as well as they can see in the south. So across the board, it works really well for how widespread out it is.
Well, it's hard to justify because the University is not a profit organization and people usually ask us for dollar value, but we don't have one. As long as their reputation is good, the students are happy, and the experience on the campus from a student and academics are good - I think that's a success for us.
Uptime has improved significantly. The dashboard automatically keeps devices up to date by scheduling upgrades at remote times (say 2am on a Sunday)
Swapping to Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points has reduced the management overhead. No more long controller software hardware upgrades and obviously no more need for beefy central controllers.
