Item: Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We resell, provide managed services, and provide installation services to our customers. Our customers leverage the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution to minimize O&M overhead, effectively use circuits, increase carrier diversity, and lower carrier costs. Customers appreciate the single orchestration portal to secure deliver configurations, view health and metrics, and prestage future edge routers. By using DIA circuits, traffic may be steered directly to SaaS or other clouds, back to the corporate offices, or directly to Internet, offloading the need to and cost of extensive head end equipment and hair-pinned circuits. As the solution abstracts the individual circuits, private and public connections may be used to create the WAN.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Transition from legacy CLI-based configuration
Template-based Network as Code approach
OMP negotiation of WAN routing
Metrics and Troubleshooting

Cons

Overcomplicated Dashboard
Initial time-to-deploy
Confusing SD-WAN design workflow

Return on Investment

Centralized management allows the engineers to collaborate in one area.
Templatized configurations make adding new device types easily.
The high cost of using a router versus a low-cost box creates a longer pay-back period.

Usability

The niche configurations are given equal focus as the standard use cases, which can make onboarding difficult in the beginning (ie why am I not using an entire tab of the portal), but aside from that part, the dashboard is relatively easy to navigate and apply the configuration. The metrics and analytics available are also nice to have in a single pane.

Alternatives Considered

Aruba EdgeConnect and Cisco Meraki SD-WAN

Silver Peak is a pretty solid product as well. It does not offer as many customizations, but that also makes onboarding significantly easier. It's a tradeoff between the amount of supported features and the complexity of the dashboard. Similarly if you are willing to sacrifice some of the features and metrics, Meraki is a strong choice for simple SD-WAN at a decent price point.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Cisco Firepower 4100 Series, Cisco Secure Access, Microsoft Azure

Likelihood to Recommend

Like a lot of classical Cisco tools, every possible feature and customization is available and presented, which can be overwhelming for a lot of people upfront. In addition, Cisco provides multiple ways to design the SD-WAN which again may cause issues when trying to figure out the "right" way if there is more than one "right" way to do it. Once configured, the product is easy to maintain with point and click upgrades, performance metrics, easy troubleshooting and realtime analytics. While the hardware used for the solution can be a bit pricy, the fully leveraged solution provides customers functionality they generally did not have before.

Evaluating Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - Traditional Site-to-site IPSec tunnels and DMVPN technologies. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN was aligned to replace the traditional WAN technologies traditionally seen connecting the campuses, branch offices, and data centers. While previous technologies worked fine, the administrative overhead made the technology difficult to scale and monitor, which meant additional person hours were necessary to linearly scale with the sites.

Key Differentiators

Scalability
Integration with Other Systems

While ease of use was important, we could repurpose the dedicated WAN team to learn this product. The scalability was important as we needed the number of WAN sites to scale without a direct correlation to scaling the support staff. Integration was another very large feature, as we were looking to create one enterprise regardless of LAN, MAN, or WAN.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I believe I would have given more weight to usability. While the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN works well, the deployment was somewhat complex in trying to understand the standard deployment workflow. Once set up, the O&M was considerably less as it was simply maintaining templates. However, the integrations were critical to the enterprise, so the intuitive GUI front end became less prevalent.

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Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN review