Cisco Meraki MS Switches beat out Juniper and Brocade switches when we did the vendor evaluation. It also beat out Cisco Catalyst switches as well, but only over Catalyst due to price. Catalyst did outpace Meraki in features, but for features we did not need. So, we got an …
Well, I guess what makes it well-suited? We're in education, so what makes it well suited, especially if you have a limited staff, just the visibility of the dashboard that you can see so much information in one pane of glass when you definitely have limited staff. Trying to eliminate those panes of glass is very important to us.
I think the cloud connectivity is very good. It helps as far as a manageability standpoint, it's top notch. I think that's the biggest bang for the buck. And also plug and play. You just plug it in and it works. It may not work exactly how you want it, but it works. You may have to do some other configurations.
It's kind of a double-edged sword with the GUI because you get a clean interface but you lose some, of being able to do granular things with it. And I've had certain things where you're looking for where to find the thing, you're on the device and that can be kind of tricky having to click to different menus and certain things get a little confusing when you're trying to put it in a larger scale. Also, I think that there's other products that are similar like the Cisco MS390's that have features of the Cisco MS3 fees and it makes it kind of hard when making purchasing decisions because if you're already committed to one now you have to swap to another one to get a certain feature you might want. And so some compatibility issues can be kind of tricky.
Being on the cloud its very easy to manage. We have layer 7 visibility and Cisco has introduced stackable MX switches which is even better! The Meraki portal can be accessed via SSO which is important to my organization (although it was a bit difficult to get that implemented initially!)
Meraki support is excellent. They are also highly proactive. They literally replaced all of a particular model of our MS switches when it was discovered that they were not sure about the longevity of a particular chassis fan inside those switches. Without us having to do anything other than ask, they shipped us all new replacements (with a better fan in them) for the 10 or so of the switches that were in the affected model group, and we shipped the defective ones back to them int he same packaging, prepaid. None of the recalled switches had ever experienced a fan failure, but they were not willing to let them run in a production environment. I like that. Meraki MS support staff are also quick to get back to you and very knowledgeable about their product. I actually contact our Meraki rep to instigate a support case (although i could call support directly), and he gets the details from me first, then opens the ticket for us and explains it to support. This means that I only even need to talk to one person, and I like that, too. Meraki MS switches are designed to be essentially "plug and play", so support is generally not needed unless the end user is not following the deployment and operation guides
Cisco Meraki MS switches are cheaper and the setup and configuration is much faster than traditional classic Cisco switches. Also the available free Dashboard offers easy access to monitoring and assurance services. Whereas with classic Cisco switches there is a need for separate monitoring system which makes it very unhandy.
The switching holds up well against HP, Extreme, Juniper, et. al at the edge. Cost is also a huge factor, and played a part in the purchase. Not just for the switches themselves, but also optics can be purchased at a discount. Service delivery has been fantastic, and in 3 years I've not had to replace any of the brocade switches I've purchased.
Cisco Meraki MS is intuitive and allows us to easily manage 340+ satellite locations and four corporate locations. Templates, intelligent patching, and alerting are fantastic. This has drastically improved compliance and managing such a large footprint. I would continually recommend Cisco Meraki MS for any multi-site organization because of its ease of use.
