Cisco Meraki MX Firewalls is a combined UTM and Software-Defined WAN solution. Meraki is managed via the cloud, and provides core firewall services, including site-to-site VPN, plus network monitoring.
$595
per appliance
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is a software-defined WAN offering transport independence, application optimization, intelligent path control, and secure connectivity.
Cisco Meraki MX is easy if you don't need multi-tenancy solutions and if the routing in the network is not so complex. But Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution is more powerful and has more features compared to Meraki.
Compared to the regular Cisco devices, the greatest thing will always be the ease of configuration that the Cisco Meraki MX gives by having a dashboard to eliminate a command line that can be difficult for some beginners, it is easier to identify if you make mistakes and fix …
I have used OpenMesh which is no longer around.
But stacked up against Cisco Meraki MX, there was no competition. Cisco Meraki MX overall had
better features, deployment, Ease of use, and Hardware performance. One of the
I would recommend [Cisco] Meraki MX devices for any environment and they will compete against any competitor well. Years ago I used Sonicwall and Watchguard firewalls to create Site - to - Site networks and they worked well on an individual scale.
The key to Cisco Meraki being the superior product is its ease of use and cloud managed portal. Although other products do offer more knobs, the simplistic design of the Meraki portal makes it easy for any user to integrate it into their new or existing networks. It really is a …
Cisco Meraki MX is great for a short term deployment. An all in one model can combine a cellular router, wireless access point, 10 port switch (with POE). Having a cellular model means seamless failover with a wired link. An included SFP slot on the MX68 series would be beneficial. Maybe in a newer model.
At our level, we had to optimize our 3 internet links (MPLS and LTE) with applications like O365, SAP, Microsoft CRM Dynamics and our collaborative work tools like Teams. We also had to ensure that both client workstations and servers could communicate with minimal latency with our Microsoft Intune infrastructure.
It provides a really good single pane of glass so you can really easily identify end to end, what is going on in your environment.
It provides the ability for someone that doesn't necessarily need a really deep level of knowledge to be able to operate and maintain it. I think that's probably a big selling point, but I think definitely for the people that I'm selling the products who just having a dashboard and being able to log onto it and see if things are good or bad is quite key. So it does that really well.
Meraki has been beautifully done for people who are actually very lean on the IT infrastructure as in resources wise. So Meraki is a very good solution to give them the simplicity on a single glass plan where they can actually have visibility over all their networks on a single glass plane by a click of button, they could actually see what's happening. They could actually do troubleshooting on the fly, including packet capture, which is such a smooth feature. Usually myself including I've been have an engineering background, all my ears packet capture, I've never seen that smooth and easy to operate that you can actually have a high level understanding or deep level depending on how much you want to go in with the click of a button. That's so beautiful. I mean everything for me Meraki is point of kind of a go ahead for everyone.
The platform itself is very feature-rich. One of the difficulties we find is that to do things, for example, in terms of monitoring and obtaining data, it's not consistent. There are multiple interfaces to get them, but you can't get the same data through all interfaces. So you end up having to try to find either the least common denominator or we have to build our own code that then mines through all the interfaces and that becomes very problematic.
The other problem we've found is that there are issues where the same amount of expected software quality isn't really there in all releases. Cisco breaks things out by like shorter or long-lived release trains. And the long-lived release trains tend to have good quality by the time you get to the second or third release within it. But then those are skips. There are like 12, 18 months skips in between those. So if you start releasing features on versions in between there practically to be safe, you have to wait until you know much later. So to be able to see new future capabilities as they come out and deploy those readily needs to improve, it needs to be much faster.
As we have it in place now, we will continue to keep it at our remote sites. Future expansion is something we are reviewing, and may well start with some of the larger switches as they seem to offer good performance and management at a reasonable price. Wireless is also something we're investing in and their devices are great for that.
We implemented Meraki in most of our organization sites, so we are always looking for ways of improving its usage, add more features and discover characteristics that we do not know we already have. As it is an easy to use tool and we are growing, hiring new employees, it is really simple to onboard the new joiners.
The Cisco Meraki MX series is very easy to use. Setting up user VPN access, site to site VPN to tie multiple locations together and managing all your devices. You can even download the latest firmware and install without ever leaving the dashboard. Meraki is the very definition of easy to use
I haven't ever had a bad experience with Meraki support. On the few occasions where I wasn't understanding the UI or needed some clarification about what a setting actually would do, I contacted them and they were very quickly able to provide help. Returns are simple and fast, too. We had to return a defective device one time and they shipped the replacement before we had even un-racked the one that was faulty. Unlike many other vendors, they didn't ask use to a do long list of scripted diagnostics, they just took my word for it that the device was broken and sent out a replacement immediately
Fast and efficient. The only issue currently is that the support is only overseas support and not in South Africa, which causes delays in resolution for some cases. Escalating issues is quite simple and the opening of new cases from the dashboard is easy. I have never had a support issue that could not be resolved.
Compared to the regular Cisco devices, the greatest thing will always be the ease of configuration that the Cisco Meraki MX gives by having a dashboard to eliminate a command line that can be difficult for some beginners, it is easier to identify if you make mistakes and fix them since everything is saved and visually you can see something that is not so good.
The Sonic wall and Cisco ASA required a lot of trial and error to get up and running. Rules and configurations were difficult to setup and were not intuative. Meraki is very ituative.
Scalability is pretty decent. We run into some issues with the more hubs we create. We've had to tune out the deployment between whether something's a hub or a spoke regionally. So as long as not everything is a hub in this environment and you're creating spokes that talk directly to hubs, that takes a lot of the CPU utilization off of anything that's deemed a hub.
Being a cloud-first solution, Meraki Dashboard will scale as needed without any effort for the client. The Meraki cloud will provision (upscale and downscale) the resources as you grow or shrink in size. You only have to physically install the MX on your site, all the management is one through the Internet via Meraki Dashboard. Worth noting that you can fully-configure the MX prior to the physical installation on site.
I'm going to say positive impact. The biggest thing is especially coming from having a third party taking care of our network to us doing it ourselves. The ease of this with the overall high level visual that we can get as to how our day is starting and running reports to see how many outages have we had, what areas have they actually been in running these reports and being able to gather if it's a certain service provider that's causing an issue in a general area, maybe we need to switch service providers for ISP. So it's been great in that mannerism for us. Ease of manage, I mean, we have a limited number of staff, we have a lot of different offices across the country. And then this is relatively new for us because we did have a previous provider doing all of this for us.
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN gave us a new perspective on SDN, ZTP and other automation tools we didn't have before
The sizing of Meraki MX series cannot compete very large and robust networks, only if we use virtual appliances. In this case, I would recommend on other vendors like Fortinet