Ease of deployment and manageability is something which is far better for Meraki compared to other devices. Hardware also is better than all other vendors in the market
Cisco name opens a lot of doors, and the Meraki MS adds resilience, features and the promisse of easy management to do the job and to be approved easely.
Cisco provides top notch solutions for each networking/security need. Cisco provides strong and resilient equipment, backed up by a strong support, and every product when compared item by item always ends up lacking, even if they have some extra feature not available in Cisco …
The business case that we need it is a solution that could upgrade or downgrade easily because we open and close contacts center or we need to redistribute workloads so Cisco Meraki MS was the solution that fix that business need
Cisco Meraki MS is ideal for small-medium and remote offices where IT staff never visit. I don't feel they are ready to support large offices or campuses with thousands of people. However in my opinion some offices can be Cisco Meraki MS and others can be Catalyst and it can …
We selected Cisco Meraki MS for the facility to have the administration trough the Meraki Cloud, give us a lot of flexibility about troubleshooting, new configuration and monitoring. Also when you have Meraki licence enabled you have full support from Cisco in case you need it. …
Cisco Meraki MS switches are cheaper and the setup and configuration is much faster than traditional classic Cisco switches. Also the available free Dashboard offers easy access to monitoring and assurance services. Whereas with classic Cisco switches there is a need for …
Meraki MX should be accompanied with the Security license to provide routing an security capabilities. The MX series provide great insite and is foundational to Meraki SD WAN and for setting up Cisco Secure Connect or the more advanced SASE solution from Cisco. Meraki MX is …
It's going to be cambium and unify mostly. Right now it's mostly on the same line. Actually. It's not leading anymore. It's on the same line, but if it's not stepping up the game, it's maybe losing.
A lot of the times we choose Meraki just because it is so easy to manage, and we feel a great synergy when we switch to everything meraki-based. For example when we are able to have both access points and switches from Meraki it becomes a lot easier to manage compared to if we …
I can't say there are any other products I've evaluated that have the cloud management features that make it like a Cisco Meraki MS. After years of configuring different network switches and routers, this kind of purchase is a no-brainer for a lot of small to medium-sized …
Catalyst is good but it requires CLI configuration which can be very complex for beginners because they tend to forget commands. Cisco Meraki MS takes out the complexity by having a GUI, and another advantage is the risk of committing bad configuration is minimized (such as …
A Cisco Meraki solution should always be in the toolbox for a small-medium office. Especially for a project team that moves around a bit. It is very easy to deploy and if after 6 months the project moves to another location, re-deployment times are much faster than traditional kit. Whilst it could do the job. It is not at the point of replacing a large corporate office of Catalyst Switches but we feel it does not need to do that necessarily.
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.
So compared to the Cisco Catalyst series, there isn't that many dolls you can turn and just optimize stuff. So particularly I'm not quite sure around how stuff like MACsec would work on the MS. It's something that I've really got to look into more and the documentation isn't really that obvious for that feature.
At the time I am writing this, Meraki MS has conver all of the required needs. Is really easy to implement, the dashboard helps a lot with the implementation and troubleshooting process, the devices are very robust and you can count with the meraki support in case you face a physical or logical issue with them.
The Meraki dashboard is one of the most intuitive and user-friendly network management interfaces available. It simplifies many traditionally complex tasks, such as VLAN configuration, port management, and firmware updates, making it easy to deploy and manage networks without extensive CLI work. Features like zero-touch provisioning, remote troubleshooting, and real-time monitoring significantly reduce the time and effort needed for network administration. The reason it’s not a perfect 10 is that while Meraki is great for most standard networking tasks, it can feel somewhat limiting for advanced configurations. Additionally, the reliance on the cloud dashboard means there’s very little local management option, which could be a drawback in environments with strict compliance requirements. Overall, it’s one of the easiest networking solutions to work with, but power users might find certain advanced features lacking.
Cisco Meraki MS switches are quite reliable, robust, and incredibly rare to experience failures. Most of the time, as with all equipment, problems arise from incorrect configurations, not from poor performance of the equipment itself. In any case, when a hardware or software issue arises, Meraki support responds promptly, and if equipment replacement is required, the service is dispatched quickly and efficiently.
In deployments using Cisco Meraki switches, no issues with performance, slowness, or loss have been reported; overall, performance is quite good. Communication and integration with other devices and brands is quite good, and the devices rarely fail.
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
The In-person trainings are very useful because allow you to ask questions in live to the instructor. In general, most training sessions have been delivered directly through the Meraki platform with on-demand videos. However, having a dedicated instructor has allowed us to address specific topics that in some cases aren't covered in depth in the courses.
The Cisco Meraki learning platform is very user-friendly and offers all kinds of videos, reading material, and forums related to the different courses. There are courses for specific topics and also dedicated learning paths for certifications. In both cases, the content and explanation are easy to understand and provide highly didactic examples, sample equipment configurations, and quizzes at the end of each lesson to assess the acquired knowledge.
In general, the implementation process was relatively simple, given that we already have a relationship with the partners and experience in other implementations, from the acquisition of licenses, purchase of equipment, configuration of switches and support from the Meraki team, everything has been easy to manage and the support from both the partner and the Meraki team has been excellent.
Catalyst is good but it requires CLI configuration which can be very complex for beginners because they tend to forget commands. Cisco Meraki MS takes out the complexity by having a GUI, and another advantage is the risk of committing bad configuration is minimized (such as typing a typo in a long command for a vlan or IP address). The GUI's just a lot cleaner to work with.
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.
I can't think of any negatives. Positive, well, I had nothing but positive things to say about it. Like I said, multiple times. Of course it does give us so much visibility, which is important to us. As far as on a daily basis, I mean the dashboard daily of course, and the use of the phone. It's just also they keep innovating and adding new features to it, which help us lower our troubleshooting times and uptime. And just the overall use of the product itself.
