Cisco Routers are still some of the best
December 10, 2019
Cisco Routers are still some of the best
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Routers
- Cisco ISR 800 Series
- Meraki MX
- Meraki vMX100
Cisco Routers are used corporate-wide, by 700+ users daily, including users on campus and remotely via VPN. They address basic user connectivity to corporate assets. We do not use many ACLs on these particular devices, opting for a dedicated firewall instead, but for routing, these devices are spot on. Meraki, at least, is much easier to set up if not as granular that traditional IOS, but for out of the box setup, can't be beaten.
- Cisco Routers set up easily (even the IOS derivatives); they are basic in a good way.
- Cisco Routers support all routing protocols (limitations on Merakis)
- Work well in conjunction with Cisco switches.
- Documentation can be challenging sometimes if questions are had. The tech docs can be overwhelming.
- 100% uptime to provide maximum availability.
- Easy administration and rollback reduces time troubleshooting and making changes.
Absolutely. Our core/distribution/access layers are all Cisco switches.
We do not implement these features at the L3 level. We instead use an L7 NGFW. The routers only route and we have some very basic ACLs there only.
Our routers in the HA pair have allowed for 100% uptime. Failover, in the rare instances it has occurred, has been seamless and unnoticed.
The Cisco routers cannot compare to a dedicated firewall, especially an NGFW, though a firewall could certainly have performed the routing functions. Primarily chosen to maximize interoperability with Cisco IOS switches inside the firewall.