Allstream SD-WAN vs. Cisco Meraki SD-WAN

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Because so far the solution showed great stability during the time, easy to use and deploy. There is still room for improvements like adding a smarter way to manage the policies to apply to the tunneled traffic, today the way to configure and manage them is quite old style, It would be better an "object" oriented way to create them.

Incentivized

Its usable very well

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is way more easy to configure as they do not use a command line interface, but a graphical user interface. Cisco Meraki SD-WAN also has configuration templates, which allows for multiple devices configuration with much less effort than conventional command line interface devices. Monitoring is also a benefit over regular devices.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized