Cisco offers the Meraki brand of Ethernet switches.
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Juniper EX Series Switches
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Juniper Networks offers the EX Series Ethernet switches, as cloud-grade switches designed for the converged enterprise branch, campus, and data center, and for service providers. They address growing enterprise demands for high availability, unified communications, and virtualization.
Cisco Meraki has made its entire existence on the ease of deployment, management and upgradeability. On those features alone most companies love Cisco Meraki platform as they can increase their network performance and decrease their network expenditure. However, it does take …
Cisco Meraki MS Switches offers more features and better ROI than other switches in the market place. They are super fast, very stabile and easy to manage. Support is high quality and easy to access. They continue to improve and expand their offerings to allow the ROI to …
Meraki is much easier to manage and train other IT admins on. The configuration is extremely straightforward so there is minimal time to replace any equipment and it automatically will download configurations to match outgoing equipment.
Cisco Meraki MS Switches beat out Juniper and Brocade switches when we did the vendor evaluation. It also beat out Cisco Catalyst switches as well, but only over Catalyst due to price. Catalyst did outpace Meraki in features, but for features we did not need. So, we got an …
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.
They work great as core switches, data center switches, top of rack switches. They can even serve as routers, their routing capability is great, except for where you need lots of routing processing power. I would not use many of them for branch office switches though, due to noise and slowness of bootup
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.
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!)
The Juniper EX Series Switches are very easy to configure and quick to deploy. The ability to make changes and troubleshoot issues is top-rated. I have never had trouble contacting support. They also have many knowledge articles on use. Always adding new features to the Juniper Mist Dashboard for easy visibility into your network
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.
Many times when contacting Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches support, it seems that it is easiest for support to recommend a straight replacement (RMA) instead of taking time to walk through a solution on the faulty system. We find we get better help from a third-party consulting firm that has Juniper certified technicians or professionals on staff. They take the time to explain processes and workflow, which Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches support seems to shy away from.
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.
The rollback, commit and confirm are the biggest players in the game. Juniper is the only one who has those features, so I believe they have a leg up in the game. The CLI is one of the easiest to work with.
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.
From a user's point of view, the ease of configuration and management has been incredible. Much less time is spent maintaining Juniper than previous solutions.
From a reseller's point of a view, Juniper is excellent. They treat small partners like us very well even if our volume is not huge. Juniper switches are part of our standard solution that has been great for our customers.
