Meraki vs Cisco Wireless Solutions

Question

Can anybody out there share any information on company called Meraki? We currently have a Cisco wireless solution but our administration has suddenly been looking into Meraki as a replacement. Any info would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks...

Answer 1

I actually have both product sets running- our main campus network has over 3,000 APs (Cisco) and we have a 6-month old Meraki installation on our London campus with 35 MR16 APs. While our lightwieght Cisco deployment has been mostly fine on the client-facing side of life, we have had a lot of angst with controllers (we've been in the game since 2006 on LWAPP/CAPWAP, with hundreds of Aeronet fat APs prior) and various code versions through the years. I also follow the industry pretty closely as an IT writer, and so have watched the likes of Aerohive get more interesting (also controllerless) and architectures like Motorola's WiNG 5 greatly de-emphasize the controller. Personally, I've become a lot more open-minded about the cloud and cynical about the expense and grief of controllers. But it's far from black and white- there is no "this is clearly better than that", especially when you've got a wild mix of client devices that just want the network to work and could care less whose label is on the AP.
Bake-offs have validity, but more so (to me) on the "how easy is it to administer" perspective than "will it work for clients?" front. Both our Meraki and Cisco environments nicely serve our clients in dense environments- if they didn't, they wouldn't stay in business. The interference detection and reporting is somewhat overmarketed (again, my opinion) as often interference sources are fleeting and you can't possibly react to every one. Meraki has provided a lot of for things like rate limiting, firewalling, a great guest portal (I can't speak favorably of Cisco's guest portal at all, and BlueSocket has the absolute best I've seen yet) that our Cisco controllers don't do without help from outside boxes- but if you already have those boxes you may not care. I do take Cisco to task on really clunky debug in the CAPWAP world, and there are often gaps between what you can do with WCS/NCS and what you have to do on the controllers directly. The point? Again, it's just not black and white.
For me, I would certainly go with Meraki again for deployments up to a certain size- like a few hundred APs- as one who is living the Meraki life currently and cringes at the price controllers fetch. It does flawless with 802.1x and has a pretty robust feature set in it (not sure why someone above is saying it doesn't)- if you need it. I've had zero problems since putting Meraki in where as I can't wait to get rid of my WiSMs in favor of 5508s (but really wish cisco would provide a VM-based controller like Bluesocket does), but both products have warts at times on the UI. Things I've griped about Meraki was quick to address or put on the short road map, Cisco not so much but eventually they resond to enough grousing. (Yes- my opinion only)
Enough rambling- I'd say visit customers that have both, and don't discount either until you do. Cisco has market share, Meraki is part of the interesting new guard that dares to do things differently. They both work, but you have to find what's right for you.