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

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

So we're trying to minimize a certain level of cost associated with bandwidth. We also have a base on the large number of employees we have, we have a large Microsoft M three five deployment. So the amount of bandwidth that we consume and the performance of it to be able to reach the cloud is fairly significant today. So our goal is to try to break that traffic out locally, but it's closer to the remote users in order to offload the backend systems from that. We also have several other projects that are either security-centric that will utilize the SD-WAN infrastructure as a connecting point, or in some cases where we'll actually for specific engineering teams who will be able to access cloud security services who will send that traffic directly to the internet using the SDWAN system.

Pros and Cons

The core of the product itself architectural-wise is designed very well for scale. So from the backend, for example, the ability to support a large number of diversified locations and a flexibility in on topology and how those can be deployed.
Bosch has a very complex kind of a deployment where how its remote sites around the world are connected. We have well over 1200 locations in our wholly-owned operations. And those are deployed in regions, I mean, literally all around the world. So for us to be able to be flexible in how the topology of those sites are deployed was fairly significant.

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.

Key Insights

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

Yes

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

Yes

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

Yes

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

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Meraki SD-WAN again?

Yes

Return on Investment

Simplified Management

N/A

Scalability

N/A

Alternatives Considered

We did a very stringent valuation a few years ago. And we evaluated probably about a dozen suppliers on paper that we evaluate just by capabilities. And, we of some other business criteria, and we whittled that down to a list of five. And out of those five, we brought four of those into our lab environment where we ran approximately 350 different test cases on, we really beat on it pretty heavily. And some of those other suppliers would've been companies like Fortinet Versa Networks Silver Peak, which is now owned by Hewlett Packard.

Likelihood to Recommend

So well suited, if you look at operations that have say sorry, facilities or locations that have around up to around a thousand employees or like some of our diverse manufacturing facilities that have smaller amounts of bandwidth that have high uptime requirements, the system is very flexible with regards to how fault tolerance is addressed, how redundancy is built that allows us to accommodate those needs. It has some nice built-in security features that allow us also to be able to adapt to different conditions. The problem we struggle with it the same time though, is that when you activate some of those other more feature capabilities, the throughput of the platform begins to drop fairly significantly. So if you add too many security features or too many other features onto it, you try to put in a bigger and bigger device in order to accommodate the same amount of throughput that you need. And, what happens then is that the overall cost now becomes prohibitive and it's no longer desirable to be deployed. There are other options that are better. The other side is that when you pass a certain amount of total throughput, so if we have campuses or larger locations that may have 5,000, 6,000 employees at them the size of the device, again, that's needed to be able to do that becomes cost prohibitive to do it. So again, that benefit that we're looking for, it seems to have a sweet spot, right? That's like between 10 megabits and one gigabit. And we don't really seem to have a good solution in the platform to address some of the other ones for us right now. Thankfully, those level of ones are very small. We don't have that many occurrences of really high throughput requirements, but we do see that in the future growing. So we're certainly looking for options for how to address those.

Cisco Meraki SD-WAN Review

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki SD-WAN