Meraki SD-WAN Reviews

Meraki SD-WAN serves as our SD-WAN. As I previously stated, we have over a thousand retail stores across the country, and we have Cisco Meraki at each one. 

I'm not particularly close to it. Because our infrastructure team is in charge of that. I'm more on the information security side. But, from what I understand, the product works well and there isn't much that can be done to improve it.

More automation is always a good thing, but I'm not particularly close to the Meraki. That is more of an infrastructure team's responsibility. I'm not too familiar with the Meraki environment, but I suppose more automation is always a good thing.

We have over a thousand retail locations across the country, and we use Cisco Meraki for our SD-WAN solutions in all of them.

While I am new to the company and have only been with them for five months, I have been using this solution for a few years.

We are working with the latest version.

I'm not directly involved in SD-WAN monitoring and maintenance, but based on what I've heard from our infrastructure team, it's working well.

Meraki SD-WAN is a stable solution.

Meraki SD-WAN is scalable.

We have approximately 4,000 users in our company.

I have not contacted technical support. That is something that our infrastructure team handles.

We do not use Juniper.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I am not aware of the licensing fees.

I would rate Meraki SD-WAN a nine out of ten.

What we do is, we sell Meraki SD-WAN to our customers as a service and they use it for multiple purposes. For example, they use it for data, voice traffic, video, and services that are now in their data centers.

Meraki SD-WAN could improve on the lead time, but this is not a problem only with Cisco. there's a global shortage of chipsets. Additionally, the solution has limited features. It's quite a standard product and not very easily upgradeable or stackable. 

We have not been using Meraki SD-WAN very long.

Meraki SD-WAN is stable and the performance is good.

The scalability of Meraki SD-WAN is limited, it could improve.

I typically work with large business accounts which use Meraki SD-WAN. However, I have colleagues who have many accounts with smaller businesses that use Meraki SD-WAN. The solution is suitable for small to large businesses. We sell to small and medium businesses when they demand less complexity.

We have used the support from Cisco for our clients and they are very good. We know them quite well.

The implementation of the solution is rather standard. It is not difficult.

We do the implementation and support of the solution.

One of the most valuable aspects of Meraki SD-WAN is the price. It is highly cost-effective.

Meraki SD-WAN is a perfect fit for those customers who want to implement SD-WAN with competitive pricing. There is not much demand when it comes to complexity and additional features. If customers want a standard SD-WAN solution, Meraki SD-WAN is a perfect fit for those customers.

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

We are customers of Meraki and I'm the company product manager. 

Meraki has a sexy interface, they've done a great job with it. 

The solution sometimes drops VoIP calls, which is a nuisance. The solution is not true SD-WAN, rather L3 VPNs. All they do is put a wrapper around it so that you don't have to configure it, but it lacks controllers. 

The solution is stable, despite the occasional VoiP dropouts. 

The solution is scalable. 

The company provides excellent technical support. 

Positive

It is pretty easy to set up with the caveat that it's not really SD-WAN.

This is not a cheap solution. Cisco has never tried to be a price leader, it's not their focus.

If a company is looking for a true automated failover, it's important to ask some very pointed questions before purchasing it.

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

It allows us to steer the traffic into two parallel links.

The most valuable features of this solution are load balancing and the security possibilities you have.

Meraki is more or less an intelligent load balancing. A lot of features are missing that other SD-WAN solutions have. For example, forward error correction and WAN optimization. These features are missing.

The best thing would be if you could have more than two uplinks in the Meraki Gateways. Also, forward error correction would be nice to have.

We have been using Meraki SD-WAN for approximately a year and a half.

We are using the latest version.

It's very stable.

We are a small company. We have approximately 120 users.

With Meraki, you have only two WAN links. You cannot have more than that.

You can scale it very easily if you want to have thousands of locations, but in every location or with every Meraki WAN gateway, you can only have two WAN uplinks.

We have not contacted technical support, it's always perfect.

Cisco's technical support is very good.

The initial setup is quite simple.

We are a training company that provides training on Meraki. It's a matter of minutes to implement an SD-WAN router.

We have a team that is responsible for maintaining this solution.

If you purchase a Meraki gateway, you have to purchase a license. It's a basic license, and you will have SD-WAN included.

When you buy a Meraki gateway, you already have SD-WAN.

When comparing Meraki SD-WAN with other SD-WAN solutions, Meraki is more or less for free. It's an easy to use solution that helps you to do things that you can't do without SD-WAN. 

It is not as advanced as the Cisco SD-WAN solution, or SD-WAN solutions from other vendors.

It does not have a very rich feature set.

For others who are interested in using Meraki SD-WAN, I would suggest that they know the limitations of the two uplinks and that it is not a separate solution. It's included in what you have. You will not have the same dashboard as you would have with the Cisco SD-WAN, or VeloCloud, VersaStack, etc.

For a free solution, I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Meraki SD-WAN saves costs for our customers and provides better connectivity. The solution has good security features. Since it is a cloud-based solution, customers can manage the entire portfolio from one portal.

Regarding the integration part, the VPN connection for third parties needs to be elaborate.

Meraki SD-WAN is a scalable solution that can be used by small-scale and large enterprises. More than 500 users are using the solution.

The solution’s technical support is good.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is easy and can be done in two days. The solution was deployed by me, an on-site engineer, and a remote engineer.

The solution needs around three to four administrators. Meraki SD-WAN enhances connectivity across various business locations, and our clients are satisfied with the tool. The solution can be used for multiple branches, connectivity, or small scale. Its implementation is also easy.

We can use Meraki SD-WAN for security purposes. We can identify traffic problems and connectivity issues from the solution's single console dashboard. A health report is also available in Meraki. We can identify and troubleshoot more issues from the Meraki dashboard. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The solution reduces the cost for the customers. They need not buy a separate Ethernet line from an ISP.

The solution provides a lot of benefits to the customers. Its functionality is very good. The tool is easy to use. The site-to-site connectivity is very good. The product is flexible. It has logs and reports. If anything happens, it's easy to diagnose the problem.

The integration with other tools must be improved.

I am using the solution currently.

The tool is very stable. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten. It is very easy to expand it when I get more demand from the customer. The connectivity is very good.

The support is very good on all levels.

It is easy to deploy the product. The configuration is easy. The deployment is easier compared to products.

The product provides customers with good security and scalability.

The product is not expensive. It is reasonably priced. We can pay the subscription fee annually or once in three years.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We are a tech services company and the Meraki SD-WAN is one of the solutions that I provide to my customers and have experience with.

One of my clients was able to optimize their traffic by having the Meraki device direct all of their branch traffic through the DIA (direct internet access), rather than through the WAN. The WAN was corporate-wide, meaning that prior to using this solution, all of the branch traffic had to be routed through there.

The most valuable feature is application performance monitoring and being able to browse packets dynamically based on priorities. For instance, I have a customer that has multiple connectivities across five different sites and they wanted to leverage SD-WAN for business and application intelligent routing. They wanted to be able to assign higher priority to packets that originate from mission-critical applications.

The port density should be improved because this solution is limited to two. We are getting more and more use cases where clients have more than two internet connections and require more than two ports. There should be three or four ports. It is possible to work around this limitation by using a layer two switch, but it does not provide the same flexibility as the statically assigned port.

The price of this solution is too high for smaller companies in Africa, where it is the enterprises that can afford it.

Meraki SD-WAN provides a very stable environment.

For example, when I travel out of my city, I still have remote access to my Meraki device. I can access things like my camera feed, I can see my dashboards, and I can manage users. The connection is almost always on, 24/7, with no downtime. In cases where there is downtime, it is almost always a problem with the provider and not the Meraki device.

The technical support from Meraki is fantastic. I do, however, see a bit of resentment when it comes to trying to integrate Meraki with other products such as Cisco ASA or Fortinet. I can understand it because they probably don't have much experience with the products from other vendors. When it comes to supporting their own product, they do a fantastic job.

This is a very straightforward deployment, especially compared to some of the other solutions that I have worked with.

The length of time required for deployment depends on the level of complexity and the environment. I've had some locations where it has taken three weeks, although two or three days is usually enough, once the design phase is concluded.

Meraki solutions come with a choice of several different subscription options including one year, three years, five years, seven years, and ten years.

Overall, this is a very good solution. I like products where you can deploy them and then go to sleep because they are watertight. It isn't going to give you headaches from support calls at 3:00 AM from a customer saying that the site is down. I definitely recommend that people look at the advantages of Meraki, and in particular, the Meraki SD-WAN because of the access to the cloud management interface.

If you ever had a problem with SD-WAN then you do not have to drive to the corporate head office or use a VPN. You can always access the dashboard from anywhere, as long as you have the required privileges on the portal.

The only complaints I have are about the port density and the pricing. They are doing a fantastic job, although there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for two purposes. One is to connect the different locations, and the other is for security.

The outer VPN is the solution's most valuable feature.

The dashboard is user-friendly. It's very simple to use.

The solution could be improved if it added more features, especially monitoring and reporting features.

The solution is stable.

The scalability is okay, but the solution is much more suited to small and medium-sized companies and isn't really suited for large ones. If you have 500 to 1000 or 2000 people it's okay. For a large international company, it's not the right product. At the moment, we have about 2-3,000 users on the solution.

The technical support has been very good. We're satisfied with the level of service they offer.

The solution is straightforward. As long as you can get all of the required information from the client, it's very easy. 

How long it takes to deploy depends on the requirements. It can vary. To configure it is easy, but in most cases, we don't get all the information from the customer which can hold things up a bit.

We have about 20 people for deployment and maintenance.

We handle the deployment ourselves.

Licensing is on a monthly basis. There are also fees for technical support.

We're a Cisco partner.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.