Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Reviews

With other routing protocols, we have had to send team members to perform installations and configurations. There is a lot of work involved. However with SD-WAN, once it is installed it is fully automated, and we can do all other tasks remotely. We don't have to send staff out to the client's location.

It's very independent, and we can establish SD-WAN connectivity easily. It is secure as well.

The cost is too high for certain countries, for example, those in Africa. The solution needs to be more cost-effective.

I would like to see AI functionalities added to future releases. I would also like to see endpoint protection features with encryption technology to prevent data from being copied from different locations.

We have been working with Cisco SD-WAN for one year.

Cisco SD-WAN is a stable solution. I have not seen any issues with stability. If you do the preventive management exercises, ensure that you have the right temperature, regularly perform inspections, and monitor the solution properly, then everything will work perfectly.

It is certainly a scalable solution. For example, you could start with the 10G module and upgrade to 40G, 100G, or DWDM. It is handled on a module basis.

We probably have 400 to 500 users.

The initial setup can be straightforward if you have experienced staff.

Cost-wise, Cisco SD-WAN is comparatively high. 

Cisco SD-WAN is a wonderful solution, and I would give it an eight out of ten. I recommend it because it is easy to establish connectivity and is an independent solution that does not require you send staff out to a client's location.

Cisco SD-WAN provides centralized telephony for our company. 

The most useful feature is centralized telephony.

I have been using Cisco SD-WAN for about five years. 

Cisco SD-WAN is stable.

Cisco SD-WAN is scalable. 

Cisco needs to improve the technical support for this solution. I rate Cisco support eight out of 10. 

Positive

Deploying Cisco SD-WAN wasn't complex, and it took about one month. 

I rate Cisco SD-WAN 10 out of 10. I recommend it.

The software for Cisco SD-WAN is overkill because the box is more powerful than required. Cisco needs to replace it with a normal router because the current one is very advanced. They expect a stable internet connection but then try to get sophisticated devices to connect to any infrastructure. However, the infrastructure requires only SIM cards, so it's not that difficult. Implementing a router and a dual-SIM router would be sufficient, but Cisco makes it complicated.

I cannot speak to additional features, but we've heard that Cisco may add analytics to the SD-WAN.

We have been using this solution for about nine months, and it is deployed on-premises.

I have not heard any complaints about the stability. The problem with this solution is with the interface, not the equipment.

I can not speak to the scalability, but we used Cisco SD-WAN for a big gas station digitalization project. The gas station had to be connected to a government-owned company and then deployed to 5,500 locations, so it was a big project. I believe a government-owned company currently completes the maintenance of the 5,500 locations.

Our company was just in charge of implementation and installation. I am unsure how many technicians they have, but the maintenance response is so slow, which may mean that the technicians are not well educated or trained about the SD-WAN. Regarding deployment, it took one person about two to three days to connect, configure and do the ATP.

The technical support is very responsive, but they lack resident experts. So they have to divert the support to Singapore or Australia. They should have experts locally to provide support.

The deployment is complex, and Cisco makes everything complicated. It took about two to three days to deploy, and the engineers completed it.

The solution is costly compared to Aruba. You also have to pay if you want to implement extra features like a VPN.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. The Cisco brand is strong, and its connections to the government are also strong. Cisco has very good distribution and connections with universities, unlike other equipment manufacturers. In addition, they provide free seminars to government officials and receive allowances in return. Cisco does a great job managing its customers.

I believe Cisco and Palo Alto here in Jakarta and Indonesia are very strong compared to Aruba and Citrix. I last heard about Citrix when I worked with Nokia and Motorola ten years ago. Citrix only does password and computer synchronization, which is done from Singapore. Citrix also did not have local support about ten to 12 years ago.

Cisco has been around for quite a long time and gives a very good discount to system integrators if they try to sell their product. Although they have high published prices, the price for a distributor or reseller is very attractive with discounts sometimes as high as about 20% or 30%.

We use it for network services. We use them as edge network devices, edge network routers, and firewall routers.

We looked at an SD-WAN service and Cisco was a vendor that provided termination of those services. We bought it and it met the specification. Cisco Viptela solution met the specification for our network.

I would recommend better-integrated management. Some of the other vendors have moved to integrated management platforms. Better analytics and operational consoles with a deployment configuration that can work easily across the network. 

I have been using Cisco SD-WAN for over five years.

It is pretty good. We have been reasonably happy with it.

The scalability is fine. The issue has not been an issue of technology, it's been one of price. 

It was straightforward.

We had a vendor and it was not hard. We took a while to get the templates, but not that long. 

Cisco SD-WAN is a good product, but as I said earlier, it's not priced competitively. There is nothing wrong with the product, but it is not as good as what you can buy from other vendors for a lower price. It depends because it's bandwidth-based licensing. It depends on how much bandwidth you put through it. Other products on the market do not have any licensing for bandwidth and that is one of its cost issues. 

We will be migrating to a different vendor. I would rate Cisco SD-WAN a six on a scale of one to ten.

The load sharing in the fabric and the cloud connectivity are both pretty flexible. The solution offers us the correct field mechanisms.

The solution is stable and reliable.

It can scale according to our needs. 

While the environment itself is not a bottleneck, the dependencies and the provisioning and the different parties involved altogether form, complexity and introduce limitations.

The initial setup is really complex.

We've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is really great. It's definitely reduced downtime. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

For us, the solution scales well. We are far away from its limits. That said, we are not, let's say, a very big company.

Technical support has been good. They are helpful and responsive. 

We did not previously use a different solution. We had a fairly traditional wide area network without any sophisticated connection options.

The initial setup is not straightforward or simple. It's very complex. 

I'm not sure how many staff members are needed for deployment and maintenance. 

We did outsource the initial setup.

I'm on the technical side. I have no idea what the price is and don't deal directly with licensing. I do know that this is an all-in deal, meaning there aren't extra fees associated with the cost. 

We're basically an end-user interacting with Cisco on this, however, the final responsibility is with our ISP.

SD is an enterprise tool and you should not use an ISP for implementation. Better to use an NSP or do it yourself. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

This technology, in my experience, has a better adoption in companies where the concern for security in platform issues and data privacy is high. The reason for this is the data is protected with encryption systems, and that functionality is audited to meet certain standards.

This is in the context of SaaS because that is where I want to take customers. My option is the cloud with pay-per-use and better cost conditions. Also, companies with large IT departments and a high number of engineers have many reasons to use it.

This solution has allowed us to implement much more flexible payment models than the current ones. As such, we can better plan the budget that is needed for technology.

In addition to this, it has prompted us to see the cloud differently. We now look with more confidence since the orchestration is SaaS, which is why we do not see a compelling reason to avoid introducing more services in this format. We plan to stop investing in physical or virtual infrastructure, reducing our dependencies on data centers where we host services.

When we talk about SDN technologies, we are referring to user experience or customer experience. The complete solution is designed based on the services and the experience that we need our users to have with them.

This product offers the ability to utilize all of the access available in the market. Importantly, it does not affect the quality of the application. The best feature of this technology that is available to us is the ability to do better load-balancing. This is thanks to the deep inspection of the packets and of course, the forwarding of packets based on the application.

I would like to see features related to security compliance, including a view of compliance with standards. With this, I should be able to do an audit of my SD-WAN network.

In addition to having a network with an application-oriented intention, I would like to have a network that is oriented to security standards. I am only referring to the WAN network because with this, we can begin thinking about issues of virtualization. For example, access to SD-LAN where we can bring security policies with the user.

I have been working with Cisco Viptele for three years and more with the first version, Cisco IWAN.

Releases and updates/upgrades for the software in each component are not simple to configure.

The scalability is great when you have a mature template for configurations.

The Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) service should be quicker to provide answers.

Positive

Prior to this, we used Cisco IWAN.

The initial setup is a little complex, especially for those with little experience in SaaS.

We used the Solution Support Partner Program (SSPP) from Cisco.

The ROI for this product in my organization is 18%.

This is not a cheap option but if you move from Capex to Opex, I expect you should have lower costs. I am talking specifically about Managed Services License Agreement (MSLA) model.

Fortinet is a solution that is a good option that is low-cost and much simpler. Meraki is another good choice for some customers.

In summary, this product is very strong when you need complex topologies to match the complexity of your services.

Initially, the primary use case was to lower costs, however, over time it has been to increase the availability of services according to the profile of the branches. 

Something very important is the security that this technology brings with it. We protect the data, we segment and give priority to what we need. In the same way, the possibility of being able to choose the underlay that I really need is great. Together with the type of service, the MPLS or Internet, is an advantage. In software-defined networks, the simplicity of doing things is its main characteristic.

It has allowed us to better understand the client's business. It breaks down a bit the traditional barriers of uptime and SLA and thus we are able to profile the branches in a better way.

Real-time traffic monitoring has become a fundamental tool for clients since it allows them to see what is happening in the moment and thus to be able to estimate trends or to project changes in a better and more assertive way.

The secure connection to the cloud is a gain when evaluating the traditional centralized internet links that generally exist in data centers.

Being able to see the traffic in real-time and know what application you are consuming, together with the possibility of taking your requirements directly from the cloud, has been useful.

Load balancing is a feature that allows us to take the best of our links and distribute the load intelligently, always with an eye on the end-customer experience.

Being able to prioritize, according to the applications, the exit and entrance of the traffic in a dynamic way, unlike the current quality of service that is rigid and static, is a tremendous advantage as it is done according to demands in real-time, so the customer experience is always the best.

It is transversal to all industries. What is important is to work on the costs of the solution.

On the technical side, manufacturer-independent solutions should be able to handle different topologies, simple or complex, and without having to invest more money in infrastructure or licensing.

What I also find should be improved is the possibility of really separating the software layer from the hardware layer since today the current offer is not well adopted by the service providers, which is why it does not reach the end customers. I understand this is an issue that directly affects the business goal of each manufacturer.

I've used the solution for five years.

The truth is that I started using an initial solution called IWAN, the intelligent network. It tried to take the best of current technologies and provide it in a network format. In my opinion, it did not achieve its goals.

It is not the cheapest solution on the market, however, without a doubt, it is one of the options that best handles complex topologies. Therefore there is a need to know more accurately what the client wants to do, what their applications are, what their flows are, and, after this consultation, define the best architecture and then choose the best manufacturer that obviously offers me a cost efficient option.

We evaluate the competition, however, within the same conditions, we wanted a dedicated equipment solution of bare metal, software, and hardware together plus the underlying layer.

This is a great solution.

We primarily use the solution for MPLS. We use it to have a connection to the telecom and we also have some radio networks that we use it for. We have two WAN ports - one is the MPLS one is the radio backbone.

The solution is excellent mainly for supporting our two WAN ports. We can dedicate which WAN is taking over and which one is available or not. It's great that we can also connect them to the internet. We can have a third line to connect to the internet providers for our internet solution. Everything is redundant and everything is working so far.

Overall, it's been working well for us.

The solution is great at aggregating the traffic and then sending it in one direction.

We have a good knowledge base in-house and good support in general and therefore we have continued to use it over the years.

The product can scale well.

The solution is very stable.

The solution basically does exactly what we need it to do. I can't recall finding a feature that was lacking for our purposes. We aren't actually using many of the features in general.

The solution could be a bit cheaper.

We've been using the solution for about three or four years at this point.

We've had absolutely no issues with the stability of the solution. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's been quite good overall.

This is deployed in our headquarters. We have them around the country, and we have some large offices and have the solution at all of them. There are likely 1,000 or more users on the solution all over the country.

The same generation and the same product is the easiest to scale and we have them mostly on some of our sites. We have the needed redundancy. That said, I would question the scalability if you are dealing with multiple types or other versions or other products. It needs to be of the same generation to take advantage of the path of least resistance.

We never test it with other solutions, however, with Cisco and other vendors is there is not recommended.

We mainly use the solution directly and as-is. There is a lot of redundancy, so if something goes wrong, there's something to catch it. We don't really use too many features for SD-WAN. So far, we don't need anything added on, and we really don't need too much support from customer service.

We buy support, however, in the latest versions, we really haven't needed assistance. IN the past, we did have some issues and support was there to help us get replacements, for example. They make getting replacements easy.

They usually reply to us within 15 minutes or so, if we do reach out. I'd describe them as pretty responsive. 

The level of difficulty depends on the experience of the engineer. If they don't have as much experience, it may be difficult. However, those that know the product well don't find the setup process complex.

Mainly they're using a command-line interface for years and they don't ask for anything like a GUI, which would be on Windows or Linux civil server. Everybody enjoys command-line. We exchanged some other Cisco products and some other routers recently, which were working for 15 years and are still working. We just asked for new ones with new features, like more traffic, more throughput, et cetera. 

I don't recall any maintenance really being needed. It works 24/7 without much need for assistance.

We did have some outside help, although nothing was from Cisco directly. We have our contact support company, and also we have in-house knowledge. It's done together, using both teams.

It would always be nice if the solution was a bit cheaper, however, the value is good. The cost of ownership is worth it as the solution itself is quite good and lasts years.

As a bigger company, we'd prefer to have a brand and a solution that's reliable as opposed to trying to find the cheapest option and have sleepless nights, afraid it might fail.

To calculate what we buy and how much it costs us for all the services, it's still quite a lot of money.

You have to pay between 3000 and 10,000 euros, or something in that range. The core switches Nexus cost me between 10,000 and 20,000 euros. However, they work, and that's why we use them.

We are just a customer and end-user.

We have 1921 and 4331 router versions. 

Not only does Cisco have a reputation, but we also have a good experience for a number of years, - five, 10, 15, 20 even years of use. Some of them still working even after all of this time.

In general, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten. If it were more affordable, I might rate it higher.