Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is a software-defined WAN offering transport independence, application optimization, intelligent path control, and secure connectivity.
N/A
Silver Peak VX
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Silver Peak VX virtual WAN optimization software combines virtualization with Silver Peak's WAN optimization technology. Silver Peak VX virtual appliances support the full list of Silver Peak WAN optimization features for functionality, including data reduction, path conditioning and traffic shaping. This enables customers to overcome bandwidth, distance and quality challenges when moving data over the WAN. The solution is part of Aruba Networks since the September 2020 acquisition of Silver…
We currently have almost all Cisco Meraki and would have loved to keep the product portfolio the same. Silver Peak was far cheaper and offered far more features. A lot of our evaluation showed that NGFW offers SD-WAN but it is not a full-featured deployment. Silver Peak is by …
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.
This is well suited when you need to deploy a virtual router to provide SD-WAN services across multiple sites. This works great for small businesses since they added firewall services. The price and feature set are also great for mid-sized enterprises due to the ability to manage multiple appliances with templates, central reporting, and ability to provide high availability of the appliances with VRRP.
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.
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.
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.
Support is great and easy to work with. They have local engineers that can help design and walk you through implementations. The engineers are generally committed to your success and very helpful in training. Multiple times we have worked with engineers to help us implement OSPF across sites as well as VRRP to provide high failover options.
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.
We currently have almost all Cisco Meraki and would have loved to keep the product portfolio the same. Silver Peak was far cheaper and offered far more features. A lot of our evaluation showed that NGFW offers SD-WAN but it is not a full-featured deployment. Silver Peak is by and large better at being able to use both links at once, offer failover, QoS, and central reporting.
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.
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
