Meraki MS Switches Reviews

Our use case of the product is for our primary infrastructure on campus and supporting our wireless network culture. I'm the director of institutional technology and we are users of Meraki. 

The solution provides us with better statistics than we previously had. That's a great feature.

Having the Meraki GUI controlled elements meant that I could train my help desk guys without having to try and teach a command line.

I'm an old CLI guy from Cisco so I've had to give up some of the granularity that I'm used to having. With Cisco I could narrow things down but now I'm stuck to exactly what Meraki gives me. I don't have any options. Previously I used to be able to look at light levels on an object but I can't do that now. Those are a couple of little issues, but I do get it right out of the box whereas with Cisco it requires spending thousands of dollars and buying extra equipment to get the knowledge of what's going on in your network.

They've already released some new things on their flagship model. I'd like to see the price come down a little bit, but you've got to pay for what you get like the 38 series switch. With Cisco you can stack them for command and control whereas with Meraki, you can stack them with power, but each individual switch is still controlled as an individual switch. You don't see them as one switch. They're stacked with stacking cables, it's multiple switches. It's little stuff, nothing serious. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

It's a stable solution and great for software updates. You just click on it and it does it automatically for you. The next morning it's ready to rock and roll. At my school, I have 170 faculty staff, and I've got 800 students.

I work in a school and we've had a huge disruption with coronavirus and having students studying remotely on campus and remotely off campus and needing more throughput than what the firewall can cope with. I'm right at the cusp of needing a bigger firewall. Meraki doesn't necessarily always have the exact feature that you'd like. 

I think the support is good. Sometimes they even tell you that you've got a problem before you get to it. They've been very forthcoming with their help.

As mentioned, I previously worked with Cisco. I was at a Cisco shop before I got here and we had one person to do networking, and two guys that worked in the help desk so I helped out on the networking side. The main difference is that with Cisco you can get exactly what you want but you can't do that with Meraki.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

It's well worth the time and effort to get the solution going and use it in the future.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

When I'm advising customers on solutions I have to know what they need. If they are happy using a cloud management platform and they are looking at running more than a single line of business, then having the web portal with Meraki is a simple solution. It provides a single-pane-of-glass in terms of management. It is easy to switch between the wireless, the security, and controlling the switching if they own all of those different technologies provided by Meraki. With other vendor brands, you might find that the operating cost would potentially increase due to them having to manage different platforms.

The most valuable feature for us are the APIs. Development there has been very exciting and now we can actually drill down to client levels. What that means is that when I look at the portal I can drill down to the users that are logged on to the network and see what they are using the network for. It is very valuable to us and the client to have that ease of use and the capability of providing high-level service and service quality on the switches. It is a nice and easy way of leveraging utility and resources by pushing out policies from a single location to wherever my Meraki devices may be.

If I was an IT manager and I had sites globally, Meraki would be a perfect fit. I could reach the devices that are overseas without me or anyone else having to touch them. It is very much like zero-touch deployment, which is fantastic. An obvious bonus is that this capability is still backed by Meraki R&D with talented teams to support it. When changes and new features come out, I don't have to worry about doing software upgrades on devices because it's all done in the cloud. They just load it up and on you go. Of course, many other things are happening with Meraki and other developments that they are working on with Cisco. The whole story will come out in the resolution of what they choose to do on the security side of things and what capabilities you can gain by using Cisco and Meraki together.

A complaint that I might have about the services is the compliance risk response. If I or our clients put too many devices on a network, threatening emails get triggered by Meraki saying that we are out of compliance. It can put unnecessary fear into the customer of the product that their services will be curtailed or that they will have to pay escalated fees. The customer in turn then pushes the problem on to the reseller — us — which can create an awkward situation. We are seen as a less-trusted advisor because what we provided was poorly planned. I think there is a major problem with warning clients in that way. I've started hearing customers wishing that they had not gotten into a subscription just because of that policy. It is all well good having a subscription policy but making customers edgy is making some consider switching away from Meraki. Losing customers due to the means of enforcement of the subscription service is pretty ill-advised.

I think one of the things that Meraki started to develop and then held back on is unified communications. Meraki started beating the drum about using Meraki for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and then they suddenly stopped it. It would be nice to actually see that coming to the market, especially in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). With Cisco's acquisitions such as Broadsoft, Meraki could potentially invest in that technology, so they would be able to provide a voice platform backed by Cisco. It could be an excellent situation and fulfill their promises at the same time.

There's been a couple of challenges with the stability of the solution. For example, a year ago some of the software products that were going into the switches were not functioning as expected. You cannot really fault the product for that exactly. They are nine out of ten in terms of stability. You turn them on, they work, they get along with other components, and they keep working.

Meraki is scalable but it's only seen as a stackable switch solution. The one thing is the mid-market where obviously Meraki has traditionally had most of their focus on. So, when you buy switches and you want to scale, you have to have them in switch stacks. What Meraki hasn't done — and missed a bit of an opportunity in my opinion — is they've not really developed a low form factor switching solution in the form of a chassis switch. I think that could open up a massive opportunity for Meraki in terms of being seen as more of an enterprise solution.

As far as our own scaling we have seen their numbers grow in terms of selling their solutions whereas we've seen other lines of business that decline. So, I'd say that we've definitely seen exponential growth in sales of Meraki as a solution. More and more customers whom I talk to get to the point of serious consideration and go through the finer processes of discovering what Meraki is all about. People who choose it seem to like it so much that they stick to it. I think the only time I've really seen a compelling reason for not going with Meraki is that the security with regards to firewalls is still Meraki solutions. They really don't quite compete with Cisco and their ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) technology.

In any case, we do continue to have plans to scale our usage of this solution for us and our customers.

I have not been in contact with Meraki support directly. I do know that there are lots of different ways to actually reach out to support people. Meraki now sells different levels of supports so that you can choose a level that will fit your needs. Obviously, as partners, I've got all the contact details. There is also the Make a Wish feature within the portal that we can use to ask for a special request. They seem to be switched on in terms of what they do and how they do it. All the technicians seem young and very knowledgeable in terms of their areas of expertise.

The installation is straightforward. There are some simple rules of a sort that you have to use. And, of course, Meraki does make it easy. If the opportunity that an end-user is working on is large enough, then there may be a reason to look into training courses that Meraki offers. They offer these in order to help customers in terms of adopting, managing, and expanding their use of the technology. 

A lot of configuration can be done on the cloud before actually having the switches go live. When the switches go live and the license has been activated, then you actually push the configurations on to the switches. From that point of view, I think it is just a great mentality that Meraki has got now around using the portal.

Of course, as partners, we do our own implementations. Our clients often need assistance from our side or from integrators for the deployments. A lot of the time our position with clients is more advisory. The customers know what they know. What they don't know and understand is what they haven't seen before. Some customers like to just dive in and try and work it out for themselves. I've seen clients on the other end of the spectrum where they need help in terms of redoing IP addressing schemes. What they need is some assistance with regards to making sure that it is all configured correctly and doing testing as they are doing the migration from one type of switch to another type of switch. The depth of our involvement all depends on the customer's skills. But even being trained as a Cisco CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) doesn't necessarily mean you are going to be able to get straight to doing a Meraki installation.

As a reseller, evaluating options is somewhat built into the business structure. I deal with Meraki, Aruba, and Cisco around enterprise networking, security, voice, and wireless.

My experience with Meraki goes back to the MS-1 series. That's when I first took the original Meraki training course and got the CMNA (Certified Meraki Networking Associate) certification. We got to play on the newest series of switches around at that time. Those have already gone past their lifecycle. We participate in ongoing training now and continue to get a look at the latest versions of the Meraki switches and get to know early on what is happening in terms of new development. The product is now becoming more of a hybrid with Cisco and other vendor products rather than just purely focusing on Meraki as a stand-alone solution.

If I have any advice for people considering the product, it is to jump on board and don't look back. If you're after a platform that is completely cloud compatible, a solution that will allow you to manage it from anywhere you need to be, then it's definitely a step in the right direction going forward. Meraki seems to cover most things. It takes away the need for CLI (Command-line Interface) which is obviously an aging technology that people were using a decade ago. Now it is a web-based interface and it is available on many different devices. You can now take management anywhere you go. How you push it out affects what you can do with it. Visibility and control are fantastic from Meraki.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Meraki switches as an eight out of ten. How good it serves a purpose depends on the use case. For different use cases and different scenarios, I'd give it a different rating. For example, if it is deployed for a data center, then I would rate Meraki very low because the product is not designed to be a data center switch. If I'm using it for total visibility in terms of applications and controls and what is happening on a network, then I rate it very high. For that, I'd give it as much as a 10. Its rating is all about the use case.

We use Meraki MS Switches to provide network security. We have around 900 users.

I've been using Meraki MS Switches for five years.

Meraki switches are stable. 

Meraki switches are easy to scale. 

We haven't had any major issues, but we've gotten general support from them.

Setting up a Meraki switch is fairly simple. It can be done by one manager and a senior engineer developer. 

We did it in-house.

The licensing cost isn't too expensive. 

I rate Meraki MS switches nine out of 10. I would absolutely recommend it to other people.

The switches make up part of the network infrastructure in the company.

We primarily use VLANs and Wi-Fi.

The most valuable feature is the ability to segment my infrastructure between phones, security systems, and other tasks.

The dashboard is very easy to use.

Better alerting capabilities are needed because they do not provide enough notification or detail about events. For example, it doesn't tell me if I have lost an access point, or I'm getting packet drops, or somebody is using excessive bandwidth because of a download they are doing. It is very hard to drill down on these problems and sometimes, you might have to use a third-party solution to pull the reports out.

Technical support is in need of improvement.

I have been using Meraki MS Switches for about one year.

The stability is great.

Our company has not had to scale our network. However, some of our clients that use these same switches have scaled up, and it was an easy process for them. This is in part because it is easy to change configurations on the fly.

The technical support for this product is difficult to deal with. With multiple levels, it is very difficult to get through to the right person that can help with the problem. It is disappointing because when you pay a lot of money for the hardware, you expect to get the support that you need to get.

I handle the maintenance of these switches, including firmware updates.

We paid for our switches outright, at a cost of between $15,000 USD and $18,000 USD.

In summary, this is a good product except that the technical support and alerting need to be improved. As it is now with the alerting, I get messages from the firewall before I am alerted by the Meraki hardware. It makes it more difficult to troubleshoot.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using Meraki MS Switches for our LAN users.

Meraki MS Switches are amazing. Whoever built it is a genius. I like that it's a plug-and-play solution.

It could be more advanced and secure. Meraki MS Switches are ideal for a mid-sized enterprise. But you can't work with this appliance if you need more security or want to do complex or advanced things. Technical support could be better.

I have been working with Meraki MS Switches for the past six months.

Meraki MS Switches is a very stable product.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give stability a ten.

Meraki MS Switches is a scalable solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give scalability a ten.

Technical support is not good at all. Even those guys struggle, and they work on a US time zone. Whenever we raised a ticket, we had to wait one or two days to get a status and move the case forward to the next level.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. You just need the Internet, and you're good to go.

We implemented this solution. You only need one person to install and deploy this product.

Cisco Catalyst is far more expensive compared to Meraki. That's the reason we are using more IT systems.

I would tell potential users that it's an ideal solution if they don't have a complex network and don't want to do much IT work.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Meraki MS Switches a ten.

We use mobile device management to track our wireless access points, and that's basically what it does for our environment.

It makes the management of SSIDs fairly easy. It's pretty intuitive. I haven't used anything else to manage stuff, so I don't know what other things are out there.

I don't like some of the mobile device management options. They're a little bit hard to find in the system.

I've used the solution for six years. 

It's a stable product. I don't see too much going on with it. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is very scalable. 

I didn't have an opportunity to use another switch. We've been using this since I've worked with the system.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I adopted the system. I did not go through the deployment.

We have seen an ROI. It's very good.

The pricing is okay. I'd rate the solution a three and a half or four out of five in terms of cost, five being the most expensive. 

We're just customers and end-users, not partners or resellers.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

I would suggest new users get a really good understanding of the network requirements before implementation.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Our Meraki MS Switches are deployed in different environments. Some are in a bank, some are in a dental office, and some are in a business office in downtown Chicago. 

The most valuable feature is the dashboard because it makes it easy to manage all of the switches. It's easy to turn them up and get it configured.

Sometimes the controller in the cloud that controls the access points does not have the most accurate information. There is sometimes a glitch in keeping the management controller that is in the cloud up to date.

I have been using Meraki MS Switches for 12 years now. 

Meraki MS Switches are stable. 

Meraki MS Switches are scalable to an extent. I think it is scalable if you are using it for residential Wi-Fi or office Wi-Fi where there is not a lot of complex configuration, I think it will scale well.

Initial setups are straightforward for us. We deploy in many different environments. Our deployment in the dental office took a few hours. Our deployment of about 200 APs in a residential retirement community was probably a month because it was 200 APs and a lot of integration. In other words, deployment can take anywhere from a few hours to four weeks depending on the size of the installation. 

On a scale of one to five, one being the cheapest and five being the most expensive, I would rate the cost of Meraki MS Switches a three. 

My advice to anyone looking to deploy Meraki MS Switches is: be aware of the fact that you cannot activate it without a license. It does not work. There are benefits tied to the licensing. The licensing provides you with maintenance or replacement, which means that it covers you from a couple of different perspectives. The licensing is multipurpose.

We use it for network connectivity in our organization. We use it across all of our locations.

It is cloud-based. So, the software is updated to the latest firmware on a regular basis by Cisco. We have a private cloud.

I like the support, and basically, that's why I'm using Meraki by Cisco.

I've had some hardware failure issues on the POE side on several switches across the years. There seems to be a problem with the POE ports of their unit system.

I have been using this solution for probably seven or eight years.

They're pretty good. I would give them a 10 out of 10.

If you're looking for cloud switches, I would definitely recommend including them in your evaluation because they're really good. 

I would rate Meraki MS Switches a nine out of 10.