Thoughts on Meraki

[Nerm]

My *new* employer is planning a complete network overhaul of one of our locations. Existing gear is all ancient Cisco and they want to rip it all out and replace with Meraki. Now I personally have only touched one Meraki device (AP) in my life and was wondering what others thoughts and opinions was of these "Cisco owned" products.

[routerdork]

The place I came to has Meraki. I've used AP/WLC setups from Cisco in the past and while they had their pitfalls I liked them for the most part. Now Meraki on the other hand has all kinds of cool things integrated. But unless everything is going to be Meraki I don't like the idea that some devices are managed and monitored under one pain of glass and the rest of the network is elsewhere. From what I've read in order for Solarwinds, or any other third-party monitoring solution, needs to send its SNMP calls to the Meraki cloud to get the data. And to make it worse not all things can be monitored with Solarwinds. So now I have two panes of glass to deal with my network. Other than what was stated I don't have any other real reasons to hate Meraki. I just don't like the cloud managed concept and I feel a company that uses it doesn't neeed/want a real engineer. We had this very discussion about switch models and I seriously considered giving notice over it.

[deanwebb]

Last I messed with Meraki, their cloud SNMP used a non-standard port, but once I started using it, my SNMPwalks went just fine. Yes, it's a second pane o' glass, and, yes, cloud management is a different way of handling things but...

... it's cheaper. Accounting is architecture, and more things will be going that direction going forward.

Cloud management means that issues dealing with that one single system may have some amazing support, but if there is an issue that crosses platforms, finger pointing will have a much higher upper limit than if local staff can manage all the platforms. Vendors never mention that, after "try rebooting" and "try upgrading to the latest patch/release", throwing other vendors under the bus is the next most-used way to not totally own an issue... and that costs can mount, sort of, that way.

But those costs are awful fuzzy and hard to quantify, as opposed to the numbers the sales and marketing guys will use that show SAVINGS! when you buy their product.

That being said, you can have some fun to see what the Cisco Aironet guys quote for their prices, even though they're going up against Cisco's Meraki. We tested both, liked Meraki the best, and then got a huge discount on Aironet... so now we have Aironet, because accounting is architecture.

[Nerm]

We are deploying more than just AP's. They went all in and bought (yes already purchased before I was hired) their security gateways, switches, etc. I am curious to see how their MX series stacks up against the devices I am used to.

As for cloud management I used to hate the idea as well. Now that I am at a company with several locations across the globe I can see the advantages of cloud management.

[mlan]

To me, the biggest negative with Meraki is that if you do not pay your subscription bill on time they will actually disable your wireless infrastructure.  Depending on how quickly your organization can pay it's bills/PO's, etc., it is something to consider.

[deanwebb]

To me, the biggest negative with Meraki is that if you do not pay your subscription bill on time they will actually disable your wireless infrastructure.  Depending on how quickly your organization can pay it's bills/PO's, etc., it is something to consider.

HUGE consideration, as it's the ultimate, "We'll just take our ball and go home" sort of play.

It's also why I don't like cloud hosting of stuff or having contractors filling out positions that really should be full-time roles.

[mlan]

Just for comparison, and I do not work for or endorse Aerohive, but they do not disable your equipment if your subscription/support lapses.  You lose the ability to modify your configuration, or receive software updates and support.  My org looked into both solutions heavily, but we are still running Cisco WLC's today.

[Uh-Oh]

To me, the biggest negative with Meraki is that if you do not pay your subscription bill on time they will actually disable your wireless infrastructure.  Depending on how quickly your organization can pay it's bills/PO's, etc., it is something to consider.

This is the problem. Also consider what happens if they decide to change pricing in the future, get sold, go bankrupt, etc. Bricking the hardware is inexcusable IMO.