Meraki

Tue Nov 19 20:58:27 UTC 2013

I started to look into them for personal and limited small business use, but stopped short when I realized their cloud management platform is subscription-based. Unless I've missed something, you cannot deploy your own internal management platform. It's all licensed through Meraki/Cisco, which means if you lose your Internet connection, you lose management access to your gear. That could be a deal-killer in certain environments. Maybe someone with more experience on the platform could correct me there.

-----Original Message-----
From: Hank Disuko [mailto:gourmetcisco at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2013 10:26 AM
To: NANOG
Subject: Meraki

Hi folks, 

I've traditionally been a Cisco Catalyst shop for my switching gear.

I am doing a significant hardware refresh in one of my offices, which will entail replacing about 20 access switches and a couple core devices.  Pretty simple L3 VLAN environment with VRRP/HSRP, on the physical end I have 1G fibre/copper and 10G fibre.  My core switch of choice will likely be the Cat 4500 series.

I'm considering Cisco's Meraki platform for my access layer and I'm looking for deployment stories of folks that have deployed Meraki in the past...good/bad/ugly kinda stuff.

I know Meraki hardcores were upset when Cisco acquired them, but not exactly sure why.

Anyway, any thoughts would be useful.  Thanks!

-Hank