Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Reviews

Primarily, the solution is meant for multi-side locations, in which different kinds of MPLS and internet to MPLS scaling over are involved, as well as configurations based on the latencies and data availability of the links. These are the kinds of parameter services to which I refer. In a nutshell, the solution focuses on the availability of the network from one side to the other. 

As there are several improvements we wish to see in the next release, I would rate the solution as an eight out of ten. 

Compresson deduplication should be added. This would make the solution excellent. The solution already affords availability, scalability, link monitoring and performance monitoring on the link. This means that if deduplication and compression could be added then, obviously, it would result in a compression of the data and a faster transmission between the side. 

If deduplication can be added at the source, then this will, certainly, greatly speed up the packet moment. 

We have been engaged with Cisco and its various solutions for around 10 or 15 years, since the start, and specifically with Cisco SD-WAN for five or six years. We did not provide the solution during the middle of last year, although we did so previously. We have not sold the solution over this past year and have, instead, acted as a service partner. 

The solution is very stable. 

The solution is very scalable. 

Cisco technical support is fairly good. 

We have at least 10 to 15 customers making use of SD-WAN, but three or four when it comes to Cisco SD-WAN. This is because we also deal in other products, such as the segment concerning Silver Peak, Barracuda and NG Firewall. As we act as the consultant, we do not limit ourselves exclusively to the use of Cisco. There are various requirements which must be considered and these differ with the needs of the customer. 

Installation is easy. While I do not recall its duration, I do so that it is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. 

The side in charge of deployment and maintenance and a couple of engineers is sufficient for handling these tasks. 

Cloud subscription management must be paid for, although this does not incur a perpetual fee. The cloud subscription comes with its own cost, owing to the maintenance and management costs that the device has of its own accord. Needless to say, there is a subscription fee involved. It is not free. 

We have installed the solution with one of our customers. We are not its end-user, but the partner or consultant. 

Mostly, deployment is on-premises. XD management is cloud-based. 

Nowadays, there are more than three or four different units and data side locations, which obviously requires some kind of SD-WAN solution, regardless of which product the person plans to use. This is requisite technology for one's network. 

I would certainly recommend this solution to others. 

I rate Cisco SD-WAN as an eight out of ten. 

Typically it's used for connecting the hundreds of branches to multiple data centers and also the headquarters. 

The mean time between the failures is much lower than was before. Also, the man-hours required are fewer. Overall, the user experience is better than before this solution.

The application link selection, I would say, is quite useful. 

The load sharing over the multiple links is great. 

We like the centralized management and aggregation aspects.

Technology-wise, it's decent.

The solution is pretty stable.

You can easily scale the product.

They did a new interface of Cisco SD-WAN. It's good.

They need to improve the licensing, definitely. It needs to be easier to license. It should also be much more affordable for a larger number of customers. This is one of the main issues when working with customers. When you want to offer them the solution, they really do not like the price.

I would love to have better templating. It needs a more user-friendly interface. 

They need to add the features that help to configure and navigate the daily features. 

It's stable enough. They hardened it to their operating system. It's not an issue.

It scales to a very high number, in terms of the hardware branch elements or hubs, or data centers, or even the cloud connection points. Scaling is not really an issue when it comes to Cisco SD-WAN. 

We currently have two customers on the solution. Right now, mostly, it's in the phase of testing to see how it fits the customer environment. They are considering growing in terms of the sizing and migrating all their traditional or legacy network to SD-WAN. 

Technical support is decent from the Cisco side. We have no complaints about their level of service.

We definitely worked with the other vendors, other competitive vendors. All of them have pros and cons. I have not switched from one vendor SD-WAN to Cisco. It's a relatively easy technology, however, it's not that easy to switch from A to B. We've worked with, for example, HPE, Aruba, and Fortinet.

The initial setup is definitely not straightforward. It takes a lot of experience and knowledge to properly run up the system and clean up all the moving parts, and all the elements of the fabric. After that, the operation is easy. Operation is not that hard, however, to get there, the initial startup is not that easy.

The deployment time depends on the scale, however, typically, the controller spins up after one or two weeks. That's not counting the high-level designs or lower-level designs. 

The deployment only needs one or two engineers, and then you might need one person to handle maintenance requirements.

We are the partners, therefore we are the value-added resellers. So what we do, is to help the customers do the implementation.

The ROI is really good. However, it depends on the company. I can't really evaluate the ROI in general. For some, it will be very high, and for some, it'll be very low. It depends on what they do, and what their expenses are.

The costs to use the product are quite high.

That said, I can't speak to the exact licensing arrangements.

The most annoying thing is that you have to pay an annual subscription in order to operate the whole fabric. Regardless, the customer isn't getting the signatures or any updates. It's just for the functionality to continue as it is. It's also very annoying. This is not only for Cisco. It's true for others as well.

A solution we're currently considering right now is Versa.

We are Cisco partners.

It's a decent technology. If a company really wants to go with SD-WAN, Cisco is one of the greatest in this area, definitely. If they have the budget for that allocated, and the operating expenses are allocated for the coming years, then I would suggest going ahead and trying it. There is always an option to go back to the traditional networking when it comes to Cisco. Therefore, if you don't like SD-WAN, you don't have to throw away the hardware. You can keep the legacy or traditional connections. That's one of the benefits of having Cisco SD-WAN.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We are a solution provider and Cisco SD-WAN is one of the products that we implement for our customers. I am a system integrator.

We use this product for zero-disk provisioning at branch offices. The controllers are at a central location and are used to manage the branches.

The most valuable features are zero-disk provisioning and link load balancing on an application basis. In the case of link load balancing, if an application is not working properly on the primary link, it may be fine on the secondary one. This means that if the first link goes down then it may still be accessible, which is a very good feature.

The process of onboarding the vSmart, vBond, and vManage should be improved to make it easier to manage in general. 

I have been using Cisco SD-WAN for one year.

Stability-wise, it is a good product and it works very well.

This is a scalable solution. There are between 1,000 and 1,500 users.

I have been in contact with technical support and my experience with them has been fine.

The length of time required for deployment depends on the scenario, but it usually takes between two and three days to set up.

As a system integrator, I deploy this solution myself.

We need a couple of engineers at headquarters to maintain it, and we don't usually need anybody at the remote sites. Normally, it's plug-and-play.

Licensing is on a subscription basis.

In summary, this is a good product and we plan to continue using it in the future. It is one that I definitely recommend.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case generally relates to customers looking to reduce their MPLS costs. In addition, many of our customers are moving to the cloud, which can handle both on-prem and cloud services, a hybrid solution. Finally, some of our customers are looking to move towards new technologies and will choose this solution, but the primary use cases are the first two - reduction of MPLS costs, using multiple modes of transport, and managing and control of technologies.

We deal mainly with large enterprise companies. A few years ago customers were not aware of SD-WAN or they were not looking to migrate to SD-WAN, but now whenever there is talk around WAN, 95% of the customers are moving to SD-WAN.

I think segmentation is a valuable feature that the product provides. I think the segmented traffic it provides is the best in the industry right now.

The product is not a cheap solution and could be improved by lowering the cost. Most customers who do not buy Cisco give their primary reason as cost. If the cost was reduced then I think we'd be able to sell more. Vendor log in could also be improved. There are a lot of solutions on the market now that are open solutions, meaning boxless solutions. You don't really need to buy the box that Cisco provides. You can upgrade to SD-WAN using the open solutions. Cisco could provide a full mobile solution but I don't think they'll do that because selling their hardware on top of the software is their bread and butter, .

Before SD-WAN came in they provided quite a few features. For example, a lot of customers were using Cisco's router and voice gateway which has not been available since the launch of SD-WAN. They are still working on restoring it. It's one of the key issues with the Cisco SD-WAN solution that would be a good additional feature. Whatever features were supported before are not supported in the SD-WAN solution now. If they could incorporate all those features for customers that would be a big improvement. 

I've been using SD-WAN for about two and a half years. We always pitch the latest version of the product. 

The stability of SD-WAN on iOS needs improving, they're in a transition phase. Cisco recently acquired Repeller. They are gradually migrating from their old SD-WAN to this new retail SD-LAN. It's been a challenge because the roadmaps they envisaged haven't quite worked out, it's not a smooth road. If you change from traditional WAN to SD-WAN from the retailers perspective, it can be a bit of a challenge. We also deploy Fortinet and that's easier. I don't know what's going to happen in the next couple of years, but for now, doing SD-WAN is a little bit of a challenge

If you can get to the first step of migration and to stable operations then the scalability is not a challenge. The Cisco solution is pretty scalable. I think it's the most scalable solution in the market, but it has to setup properly. Once it's set up properly. Then scalability is not a challenge. Scalability is more of a challenge with products like Fortinet. The initial migration to SD-WAN is more of a challenge here.

Technical support is very good, better than most of the vendors in the market, but they charge for it. 

It depends on the customer. For smaller and medium-sized customers, it's not that difficult. But recently I have faced problems in migrating because it's where some of this new Cisco iOS is SD-WAN. It seems to be a bit unstable moving to it. All these complexities make migration difficult. It's not a cakewalk.

Again, deployment time depends on the customer and size of the company. It's hard to generalize. I'm from the presale team so we don't implement. We have another team dealing with implementation and there are around eight people in that team. 

The solution is not cheap.  Most customers are now moving from an APEX spending model to an OPEX spending model. The licenses are pretty expensive. There are additional support costs which is not inexpensive. Licensing, support, product, technology, and everything in the Cisco SD-WAN solution costs. I think it's the most expensive solution on the market.

It's important to realize the product has two layers, the underlay, and the overlay. The controller is in the overlay and the underlay is the physical devices. Most of those are on-prem, but the controller is mostly on the cloud. That's what most people prefer.

In terms of size, different customers have different migration plans and different approaches. For example, Cisco has the Meraki SD-WAN solution, and then they have the retailer SD-WAN solution. The question is which solution fits the customer best. I would advise them on that aspect first before deciding whether they go for a Meraki solution or a retailer solution. The second aspect, of course, is the budget. How much does the customer want to spend? And the third would be to ascertain their internal skill set on deploying, managing, and operating the SD-WAN solution. If the skill set is in-house then good for them, they can go ahead. But if not then I would propose a managed SD-WAN solution where maybe, for example, our company provides managed SD-WAN solutions for some Cisco products. The third thing I would advise for global customers is to decide if they want to deal with the last mile connectivity themselves or find a partner to do that for them. Security would be a final consideration and that depends on setup and scale. 

I would rate this product a seven out of 10, it hasn't quite made it for me to be rated higher. I'd like to see some improvement. 

Viptela (router) SDN-based services:

• Hybrid networking.
• Combination of low-cost appliances and virtualization.

While it is not implemented in our organisation, I have been looking in SDN for quite a while and had some concern about hype and buzz words surrounding development of the subject.

With Viptela (Cisco is buying this start up), it is the golden average on what I would like to see in SDN implementation.

I have not used it yet.

Stability (especially running in virtualized environment) is an issue SDN vendors do not talk about until customer learns the hard way. It has to be tested.

Scalability is a strong selling part of virtualized solutions. I hope it is the case for Viptela; something to test.

This is definitely a product worthy of being evaluated and tested.

The attractive part is a combination of low-cost appliances and virtualization.

Cisco SD-WAN is used to establish a wide area network, a WAN for LAN, WiFi, and support.

I have been using Cisco SD-WAN for approximately 15 years.

Cisco SD-WAN is a highly stable solution.

The scalability of Cisco SD-WAN is great.

The technical support from Cisco SD-WAN is excellent.

Cisco SD-WAN is not as easy to deploy as the Meraki and FortiGate solutions. The zero-touch deployment could be a lot better. The deployment and initial setup are complicated and could be better.

Cisco SD-WAN is more expensive than its competitors.

Cisco SD-WAN is a great solution and definitely worth the investment.

I rate Cisco SD-WAN an eight out of ten.

We are using Cisco SD-WAN in the public sector and it is deployed in a hybrid infrastructure.

The most valuable features in Cisco SD-WAN are the QoS, AI, and simple interface for users to access.

There should be more security features in the hybrid and on-premise deployments of Cisco SD-WAN. The cloud has most of the security features.

The AI is good, however, they can improve on it. The endpoint flow from the router to the data center needs to have consistency. Cisco doesn't have a solution for all the devices for the customer. We need more support for all kinds of devices.

I have been using Cisco SD-WAN for approximately four years.

I rate Cisco SD-WAN an eight out of ten.

I have a partner in a manufacturing company that wants to reduce the use of the MPLS when using the internet. I proposed they use Meraki for the SD-WAN hub and since they only wanted to use a few WAN links I suggested the Cisco SD-WAN for their domain, main protection, and the internet for the backup of all the transitions that do not need critical time.

I have found the performance and the Zero-Touch provisioning helpful which makes it easier for us to develop.

The solution could be more secure. Security is always a priority for us.

I have been using the solution for approximately one year.

I have found this solution stable.

The solution is scalable.

One of my client's organizations has approximately 5,000 users using the solution.

The solution is easy to implement and maintain. 

If we already agreed on the design and conditions with the customer the installation can take approximately two hours to implement the hub. For the SD-WAN it can take less than one hour and if we use the VPP it is even quicker.

There is no license required for this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Cisco SD-WAN an eight out of ten.