Cisco Meraki MS vs. Ruckus ICX Switches

Cisco Meraki MS suits a lot of environments, it can be connected to all kinds of vendors, but the scenario that will give you more control and visibility of your network is if you have more Meraki solutions to use and admin all from the dashboard. But if you only use Cisco Meraki MS you can also have all the functions and features from the switch, using in most of the cases as access layer.

Incentivized

I love this switch for access and aggregate, especially due to the lack of needing reboots. [Other systems require this] reliable and stable platform.

• 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.

Incentivized

• They are relatively easy to configure and to maintain.
• They have all of the high-end configuration capabilities as Cisco switches.
• The switches have excellent performance and reliability.

Incentivized

• I think it may be fixed now, but for a long time, there was no equivalent of "show version" to see the exact uptime of a switch. This led to questions from upper management sometimes like "when was this device last rebooted?" and there was no way to answer if it had been longer than 3 months.
• Sometimes there are somewhat "generic" errors on the Dashboard when looking at devices (those yellow error messages like DHCP error). If the error messages were a little bit more detailed it could go a long way into troubleshooting issues faster.

Incentivized

• Licensing for the 10GB ports is a bit pricey, but that was 5 years ago, so things may have changed
• The CLI commands are slightly different than typical Cisco commands
• Their rack mounting was not the prettiest in the world

Incentivized

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!)

Incentivized

It can be a simple or as complicated as you need it. It scales well too, so you can expand options or change out models if you need more later on.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

very smoothly

Incentivized

Well, we've been using it for quite a number of years, so I guess I have evaluated, this is on the wireless side, the Ruckus platform, and it did not compare to the Cisco Meraki dashboard as far as the way it is utilized.

Incentivized

The switching holds up well against HP, Extreme, Juniper, et. al at the edge. Cost is also a huge factor, and played a part in the purchase. Not just for the switches themselves, but also optics can be purchased at a discount. Service delivery has been fantastic, and in 3 years I've not had to replace any of the brocade switches I've purchased.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Equipment just runs
• Sometimes past EOL/EOS
• Firmwares just work