Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is a software-defined WAN offering transport independence, application optimization, intelligent path control, and secure connectivity.
Nuage Networks, a Nokia company, offers the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP), which provides software-defined networking (SDN) and policy-based automation for cloud deployments. Designed for large enterprises and service providers, the vendor boasts supporting clouds of all sizes and architectures, from datacenter private clouds to large enterprise wide area networks (WANs) and some of the largest public clouds in the world.
The software-defined networking (SDN) solution's…
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.
I can recommend the use of this software, the objective points that we had as an organization for months could be met. I am not saying that it is free of problems but it gives peace of mind and confidence that it is backed by a large company in the technology industry.
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.
There are certain tools that need training to be able to use them. One of them is SASE which requires reading long documentation and the support of qualified engineers is needed. I think this is difficult and does not allow you to explore all areas of the Nuage environment.
There is intermittence in the afternoon hours. I mean by this that in the afternoon hours from 6 to 10 pm the platform does not load in the way it should, filling options are slowed down and the same thing happens in the early morning hours, the support team has not yet determined the exact reason for this.
Volume discount could not be negotiated. That in this case a really extensive investment was requested for first-time use of the product.
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.
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.
Once your template is set up Meraki is easy to scale. Even creating the template is easy and I was able to learn enough in 4 hours to build, test, and deploy templates for our locations. Best part is you can stage your deployment by adding a unit to a template even before taking it out of the box.
It was mostly around logs. I mean I understand because the aim is to provide the simplified solution to the people as an end user, be it an IT manager or the oil team. So I understand where you don't have lots of tools assigned where you can actually take help from the track. But in terms of having that logging information, I think that's where it's been a bit of a kind of journey where struggling, we have been struggling there.
It has allowed us to unite different computer methodologies for the control of breakdowns in the cloud.
This supports commitment and meets business objectives in less time. This is simpler and the benefit is obvious.
Improving incorrect procedures in this sense allows us to anticipate correcting errors by giving us alerts and avoiding wasting too much time solving specific problems in the future.
Meet business objectives in months and it has been surprising. A specific business objective was to improve our facilities to be able to deliver faster service to our customers and achieve higher profit income.
