Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Reviews

The most valuable feature of Cisco SD-WAN is its compatibility and integration with the rest of the infrastructure.

Cisco SD-WAN could improve on the ease of integration, the configuration should be easier. At the moment the process is more command line based and it would be better if it was able to be done through an interface.

In a feature release, Cisco SD-WAN could add more features for wireless SaaS-based solutions.

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

Cisco SD-WAN is stable.

The scalability of Cisco SD-WAN is good.

The support sometimes is delayed. They could improve their response times. They are knowledgeable about the solution but you have to reach the correct person.

I rate the support from Cisco SD-WAN a three out of five.

Neutral

The initial setup of Cisco SD-WAN is not overly complex, but there should be a good understanding of the configuration and setup. There are many technical commands for the process that one should be aware of.

I rate the initial setup of Cisco SD-WAN a three out of four.

We used a third-party vendor help to implement the solution.

Overall, we are receiving a better financial cost advantage using Cisco SD-WAN than what we were using before.

I rate the ROI of Cisco SD-WAN a four out of five.

The price of Cisco SD-WAN could improve, it is expensive. The cost of the solution is approximately 30 percent higher than competitors.

I rate the price of Cisco SD-WAN a two out of five.

There are other competitors in the market that work well, such as Fortinet. The best solution is determined by its ability to handle a use case. There is not one overall best solution, there are suitable use cases for the different vendors.

If a customer is looking for a solution for a large enterprise, then I would recommend Cisco SD-WAN. However, if they have a small setup for a small business setup, Fortinet is better. It is integrated well with all the security features.

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

Our use cases are mostly focused on the application side and any kind of cloud breakout, like local breakout clouds.

I'm focusing on using the application ware routing.

There's not much that should be improved, but the focus should be on the application side and more cloud applications should be added into the system. Most common sales applications should be supported.

Mostly, I think cutting edge solutions should be included in this product. I'm talking about buzzwords like the cloud, for example. The solution should be more focused on the cloud because, apart from the controllers, everything can be cloud-based and everyone is moving to the cloud. Cyber security should also be implemented in the solution, along with maybe implementation of AI/ML.

I have been using this solution for about ten years.

The stability of the solution is good as of now. 

The solution has great scalability. The people using it are mostly senior management, junior management, and junior engineers. Maintenance for this solution requires about four people: two senior employees and two regular employees.

I have been using Cisco since the beginning. I am familiar with it and it's easy to deploy, so I am sticking with it for now. I have no plans to switch to any other products, but we are looking at integrating this product with other solutions. 

The initial setup was easy and straightforward.

The deployment was done in-house and did not take more than two to three days.

The return on investment is good. I mean, not when compared to the other solutions on the market, but it is pretty flexible and scalable, so you cannot only consider the cost. The solution has flexibilities that benefit you. The return on investment, if you ask me, can be seen in the long-term. If the organizations who are deploying it are looking to grow for a certain period of time, maybe a longer vision of five to seven years down the road, the solution will be helpful to them.

The licensing cost is slightly on the higher side, but some of the customers are large, so they are willing to pay for it. On a scale of one to five, I would rate Cisco's pricing as a three. 

My advice is that there might be some other solutions on the market that are also pretty good, so they need to understand their market and customer requirements. Think about which solution will be easy to deploy and also how scalable it will be. The strategy should be to understand the solution and have an approach and proper plan and roadmap before implementing the solution. Also, compute the information of the devices before implementing the solution.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten.

Cisco SD-WAN is primarily used in the banking industry in Pakistan for bandwidth development and application control.

Cisco SD-WAN's best features are the development of network links, application control, and bandwidth monitoring.

Cisco SD-WAN's clustering mechanism needs to be improved. If there are more than five milliseconds of latency time between installations of the VM manager, the cluster automatically breaks down.

I've been using Cisco SD-WAN for a year.

Cisco SD-WAN is stable.

Cisco SD-WAN is very easy to scale.

Cisco's technical support is very good, and they're one of the few companies that provide local support. If we face any problem, they respond to and resolve it within three to four hours at most.

Positive

I previously used Forcepoint, but they have no local support, which means we had to wait much longer to get resolutions to our issues. Cisco's knowledge base was also better.

The initial setup wasn't easy, and I would rate the setup experience as two out of five.

In the first phase, our partner implemented the solution, but afterward, we managed it by ourselves.

For 600 links, the license for Cisco SD-WAN costs us US$250k a year. In Pakistan, we have the option to get this solution at a more discounted price.

I would give Cisco SD-WAN a rating of seven out of ten.

Cisco SD-WAN is predominantly used for the zero-touch deployment, centralized dashboards, and live monitoring of tunnels and the links. It's also used for software image management. 

This solution is deployed on the cloud. 

One of the most valuable features is that they have multiple SD-WAN options: you have Meraki for simple management solutions, you have Viptela, and you have the option of having any type of WAN interfaces. Presently, you can also have a single combined solution for both WAN as well as for voice, so you can have a voice bundle as well. These are major unique points of this solution. 

This solution could be improved with a simpler implementation process and licensing model. 

As for additional features, maybe from a security perspective, it could have more features built into the SD-WAN itself. Rather than going and integrating Cisco with some other solutions, it could have one single SD-WAN solution with more advanced user security features. 

I have been working with this solution for 15-20 years. 

The stability and performance of Cisco SD-WAN are really good. It's a reliable solution. 

This solution is easy to scale. 

Cisco has multiple options: it has Meraki SD-WAN, which is a simplified version. It can be suitable for any retail or small- to medium-sized customers. For large customers, we have Viptela, which is for customers who need more control on their traffic. This solution is suitable for any type of customer. 

I have contacted technical support, but it wasn't specifically about SD-WAN. Cisco's tech support is wonderful—they have a good support team and they have a Customer Experience team as well, where they completely focus on the customer environment. There are dedicated resources available for large customers, and the Customer Experience team supports customers from the same cycle, as well as implementation, so in that way, it's really good. 

The implementation process is complex because there are multiple touchpoints and initial configurations that we need to do in order to get the setup up and running. For example, opening a lot of firewall ports. Overall, it has multiple components to manage—there are multiple controller components where we need to do the configurations to get it up and part of the architecture. 

Compared to a few other OEM solutions, it's a bit complicated because there are multiple controller elements. For example, vBond: I have to do some specific configuration to it and need to have a public IP for it to be part of the architecture. Then we have vManage and vSmart—three, four components are there which have to be managed, which is why we have to do specific configurations for those. All the control elements can talk to each other, which is why it's a bit time consuming. Even in the cloud, you have to make some changes to your existing setup so that it can be part of the SD-WAN architecture. 

We implement this solution for customers. We are a Global Gold partner of Cisco, so we consult, design, implement, and provide support to customers. 

We're an SSP as well, so we also offer maintenance services. We can provide standard maintenance services of supporting only the hardware, or if a customer asks for full managed services, we can deploy our engineers either on the customer side or remotely. We have a NOC facility, from which we can provide remote support. 

The pricing is fair, and it's on par with the market vendors. But based on the competition, Cisco could work on the pricing, go deep on discounts and provide more commercially viable solutions to customers. 

Some similar SD-WAN products from different vendors are Silver Peak, Steelhead Riverbed, Fortinet, VMware, and VeloCloud. Frankly, I've only been working with Cisco, but Silver Peak seems to be good too—I heard that they're doing well in the market. Otherwise, I know about these products and have seen how they work in webinars and trainings, but I haven't really worked on any products apart from Cisco. 

I rate Cisco SD-WAN a ten out of ten. 

To those considering implementation, my advice would be to understand your current infrastructure better. What exactly is being implemented, currently, and what use cases are you looking at? Having a thorough understanding of the existing infrastructure would really help to decide which option to go with: either the Meraki SD-WAN or Viptela. Have a thorough understanding of how your infrastructure currently is, connectivity, how the architecture is, which applications you use, and which use cases you're looking at. These things are helpful to know before choosing and implementing a Cisco solution. 

Some clients resist switching to new technology and they're also afraid of problems with compatibility and the layout of the NOC. The NOC must change because nowadays new things are happening, but I believe that the beauty of SD-WAN is the vEdge. So for the customers that are afraid of new technologies, we can install the vEdge without spending a lot of money. It's just a virtual machine over there. You can do it on Cisco CSR or even ISR.

So we deploy a new branch or similar branch with this technology and show them. Then they're not afraid of it. It's very easy. Now, vManage is coming. So we have the analytics team, we have all the GUI interfaces so you can create a policy and now deploy it anywhere or you can define it. I believe everything is very easy for the people who want to work with it. 

Technologies are not new. Just the name changes. VPN is the same as VRF, which is the same as Tenant, but the way they're playing with this technology is very different. The method of management is different. I believe that if I show clients what is happening with vManage— the interface, the analytics how you can integrate with them—they will be in love with that. Mostly what I have done is to define and elaborate for them the differences between two solutions, and point out the advantages like visibility and easy management. In the end, but they agree to move to SD-WAN

But I believe that most of the customers are still afraid of SD-WAN because they rely on old solutions. And the old solution was great and working for many years, so they are afraid of the new solution. With vEdge, we have a great way to attract them to make them feel comfortable upgrading everything into the Cisco SD-WAN.

The best feature is SD-WAN's automation capabilities. I believe many customers don't care whether we use VPN, or that use color or mGRE. When you're talking about management of, for example, a DMVPN solution or MDI solution, what is the option? So we have to go to a bug-by-bug report, like for example, NSRP to show these things. With vManage, we can see everything. We have a graph that we can click on and it helps us to remember better. 

Another good feature in the HCI is the integration of a health monitoring system. Other solutions like SDx are all the same. They have an integrated health monitoring system. So if you are deploying a data center, the options aren't really that great. But this integrated health system in HCI in vManage or even SD-WAN in the vManage is helping a lot. And also 

Customizing SD-WAN is very easy because you can define two colors. You can define two different operators. You can deploy a partial mesh, a full mesh, or hub-and-spoke totally differently. If you want to do this on a DMVPN solution, that's really hard. Also, things like Quality of Service in mGRE environment, in my opinion, are very hard because when you are dealing with mGRE, you have one tunnel at the hub and a different tunnel at the spoke. So what if I want to limit the traffic in my hub at the spoke? Because I have one tunnel, all the branches will be affected if I implement a limitation or restriction. So that's why we have advanced technology, like adaptive quality of service. With SD-WAN, the QoS is much easier because it is separate from the VPN.

The very beauty of SD-WAN is the separation of the plane. Right now, there are different planes. Compared to other solutions, the whole thing is totally changed. Rebound and vManage came into play as well as the new protocols like PnP. I started to convert most of the solutions from regular DMVPN into SD-WAN because we have the capability to define our VPN or define our color and customize by making a full or partial image. 

In the next release, Cisco should focus on simplifying the configuration of SD-WAN.  SD-WAN has a lot of room to grow. If you compare vEdge and something like Cisco CSR, you'll see the difference. Because vEdge is natively from Viptela, it is a little more complicated to set up an SD-WAN compared with an ISE device like CSR or ISR, or ISR 4000. You have now two different configuration spaces like iOS, and then some commands and styles are Viptela. So this is the thing that Cisco should work on. 

I've spent a lot of time on it. I started with version 17 when SD-WAN first came out. I continued using the product after Cisco acquired Viptela because I really love Cisco. I followed everything Cisco-related since I was 18 or 19. I got my CCNP in 2003 and my first CCA in 2011. So I spend all my time on Cisco systems. Right now, I have more than 32 certificates. I recently passed the CISSP. I also have more than 20 certificates that have expired, like Cisco Sales Expert, Cisco ASA, VPN, and several old things.

SD-WAN is 100 percent stable. If you use the suggested operating system, all the Cisco solutions are stable. According to the Gartner Magic Quadrant rating, I believe Cisco was No. 1 three years ago. Now it is No. 2 or 3, so I believe that they could improve more.
And many customers have used DMVPN or VPN solutions for many years, so those solutions are also extremely stable.

it is very easy to deploy the whole solution. I have a customer with VoIP and data. For most of the data, the hub and spoke are enough, but for IP telephony or collaboration like chatting or video conference, they need to have a connection between spokes —between branches together — but not for data. With SD-WAN it's very easy. 

I think vEdge is much easier to work with when you compare it to Cisco CSR. Most of the people I know prefer to use ZTP or Zero Touch Provisioning, but it depends on the type of customer. With some customers, ZTP maybe is not the best solution. They should know what's going on. And if you try to configure SD-WAN on a solution like ISR 4000 or CSR, and you compare the same thing on vEdge, you will see that the vEdge is very straightforward. I believe in CSR and ISR 4000. There are some glitches. It's possible that you will get a little bit confused, but you have followed the instruction. You have to do it very carefully. Then you make the connection vManage and everything is done.

I would rate Cisco SD-WAN seven out of 10. 

With my first client on Viptela were getting MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Service). That is a type of communications network that most of the major providers like Verizon offer. They were paying roughly $3,000 a month for each one of their 30 branches. That was giving them 10 megabits per second. We replaced that with the likes of Verizon Fios and Comcast. Each one of those business internet services cost about $200 apiece per month. The cost of the SD-WAN was maybe another $200. So for $600 a month, we replaced something that was costing them $3000 a month, and they were getting a minimum of about 50 megabits-per-second upload and download.  

Because our client uses two different ISPs at each location, the service is always up. The chances of Comcast going down at the same time that Verizon Files goes down is very, very small. The result is that the client's services are always up with much higher speeds and much lower costs. I think that those benefits are the ones that people are primarily interested in and that is what SD-WAN allowed us to achieve.  

I think that the SD-WAN had everything that my client was interested in in our first experience with it. I think that some of the solutions now are being integrated with other services. As an example, Fortinet has a product called FortiGuard. Included in the FortiGuard product is an SD-WAN. So some of these products are expanding capabilities so that they have more to offer in a single product.  

That would be a nice thing for Cisco. They could provide you your firewall and your SD-WAN solution together. Some people like that approach of nesting products or bundling because they have fewer vendors to deal with and immediate integration.  

I am sure as time goes on that the threat landscape will continue to change all the time. What was good encryption five years ago may not be such great encryption today. Because of that, I am sure that you have to constantly be looking at the threat landscape to see if you need to change anything. I do not know if I am close enough to that cutting edge of the problem to answer the question as to what Cisco's solution really needs. All I know is that my client is very happy with what they have got in the way of savings and functionality. That does not mean that there are not some other things that they would like to see. I just do not know what they are.  

There are a number of large companies that have bought out various SD-WAN vendors. If you looked at VMware, you will find that they also have an SD-WAN that they bought. There are several other companies that have bought SD-WAN services because the technology is so good and the cost benefit is so great that it is worthwhile for almost any company to implement it. They get the advantage of performance and the benefit that these systems never go down.  

As an example, one time locally there was an incident where two providers, CenturyLink and Level 3, went down at the same time. If you had CenturyLink and Level 3, your connection to the internet would have gone down for six or seven hours or whatever the overlap of those outages was. That would be an extreme case. There is another local ISP service called Cox, if you had CenturyLink and Cox, Cox did not go down. In that case, you would continue using your internet or your connections to your branches without ever experiencing an outage and it would just go through Cox. The reason is that Cox's infrastructure, their central office, their wiring, their co-ax cables, or fiber are completely separate from what CenturyLink uses. CenturyLink has got a completely separate central office and completely separate wire. So the chances of those two entities going down exactly at the same time is something that just never happens.  

I helped a client implement a solution called Viptela a while back. Cisco purchased Viptela in August of 2017 and that is what Cisco uses as thier main SD-WAN solution. That first encounter was probably about four years ago.  

The system worked extremely well from the beginning and there have been no issues with stability. In fact, stability is the reason why the solution was put in place.  

SD-WAN is certainly scalable. Huge companies use SD-WAN. Ever heard of Jiffy Lube? Ever heard of PNC Bank? Ever heard of Gap? (I do not know whether Gap surviving because of COVID) Those are just a couple of companies off the top of my head who are using SD-WAN solutions. It is largely scalable. I think that PNC Bank had something like 4,000 locations. It is very scalable.  

In the SD-WAN world, they have something called an orchestrator. On the orchestrator, you can see everything that is happening on your SD-WAN. So you can see if a particular carrier is going down, or if you are experiencing errors or whatever. You can see a complete picture of your entire wide area network in one pane of glass. In the old days before SD-WAN, if you had six carriers, you would have to go and look on six different carrier systems to find out what was going on. Even then, you were not necessarily getting all the information that you needed. SD-WAN is the greatest thing since sliced bread when it comes to having an overview of services.  

It is very widely adopted because it is better and cheaper and easier. You are seeing more companies looking for those solutions. Some of the telecom companies are offering SD-WAN. Some of the UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) companies are also promoting SD-WAN. One of the reasons that they are is to assure their clients that their telephone service will always be up.  

Any technical support we needed was great. Everything worked from day one so there was not a lot of need for those services.  

Our client was using a single service and they wanted a more reliable service, higher speed, and much lower price. We found that solution for them by integrating services. Instead of paying $3000 a month for each of 30 locations, they got it down to about $600 a month for each location. They switched because they got what they wanted.  

The initial setup and installation was pretty straight forward.  

The people from Viptela, at the time, assisted in the implementation. They were helpful in pushing along the implementation and it went smoothly.  

Depending upon the speed and depending upon the vendor, if you are getting SD-WAN as a service, it is probably something in the neighborhood of $100 to $200 a month per location. That is the cost of the SD-WAN. Then, of course, you need your business broadband connections. Business broadband with like 50 megs symmetrical or 100 megs symmetrical and may cost something like $100 a month or so. But at any rate, the services are not very expensive and they are widely available.  

The advice that I would give someone in the market for an SD-WAN is to look at Gartner and see what Gartner has to say. My information is recent in that the bank that I implemented it in does other business with me and they tell me that everything is working great. They have never had a problem. It is now four years later and it is probably worthwhile taking a look at what the competition is doing — including Cisco Meraki, which is another SD-WAN offering from Cisco. A lot of companies have implemented Cisco Meraki, and Cisco Meraki is a good solution. But there is also Versa which is a good SD-WAN solution. There are at least seven or eight very well-known companies that provide SD-WAN solutions.  

On a scale of one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Cisco SD-WAN as a ten-out-of-ten. For my client, it was certainly a ten between the cost savings of 80% and a performance boost of 400% or so. It worked right from the beginning and saved them a ton of money.  

We use the solution as a router.

Cisco is very secure and very fast, and its work is ongoing. They give the commands to what they want.

Everything is on one disk. I need to do anything from one end.

The solution could be cheaper.

I have been using Cisco SD-WAN for about two months.

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable. Over 600 users are using this solution.

Support is fast and customer-friendly.

The initial setup is complex and takes about 30 minutes to complete.

The tool is very expensive. It has a five-year subscription.

Cisco and Juniper are very costly.

Overall, I rate the solution a six or seven  out of ten.

Cisco SD-WAN has separate OMP routing. 

The solution is very costly. 

.I have been working with the solution for a year. 

The solution is stable, and you need good connectivity. 

Cisco SD-WAN is scalable. 

Cisco SD-WAN's support was good. 

Positive

You can get subscriptions for three or five years. 

You need expert engineers to handle Cisco SD-WAN. I rate it a ten out of ten.