I'm a consultant. When a customer moves buildings, I help them understand what they're going to need for the new building. We put them in touch with all the right companies that can help put that together.
This solution is usually deployed in the cloud.
Meraki provides the most features. It's helpful to be able to see that your network is online. Something I love about Meraki is on all the Meraki switches in the dashboard, you can see what their current data transfer rates are, and you can run cable tests from it. We've used the cable test function numerous times. It's fantastic.
One of the things we love about Meraki is that we work a lot with audio visual systems for new buildings. We find that Meraki has all the features you need to be able to enable complex network protocols for AV equipment. We deal with a streaming product over IP, and Meraki is fantastic at that. With wireless presentation, you can set Bonjour and mDNS replication really easily on your wireless network and have it traverse different VLANs and different wireless servers. It's fabulous, but you have to know how to do it.
It's a very complex system. Customers have told me that sometimes there are lots of advanced features that are available and that you can change in the dashboard, but sometimes it's very hard to know what they are. It would be very helpful if next to a lot of the settings, they had a button you could click on, and it would explain what that setting actually does and how it affects your network.
Particularly when you're in the dashboard and particularly when you're looking at wireless networks, they have so many advanced options and they're hard to understand. A lot of people don't know what beacon intervalling is or even basic things like channels.
Meraki has good documentation on their website, but if it was better linked with the dashboard, it would make it a lot simpler. Small businesses that we deal with use Ubiquiti. In their dashboard, next to every setting you can see what that setting does, which is really helpful. DrayTek is like that as well.
We always employ a third party who knows the system inside and out. If you apply it yourself, it would take you forever. From my perspective, that would be the number one thing I would want to see improved as a high-level person, because it would save us a lot of money if we didn't have to employ a third party.
I have been using this solution since before it was purchased by Cisco.
I would give technical support an 8 out of 10. It's very good. We're very lucky. There are a couple of people who are based in Australia who are part of Meraki support, and they're easy to get a hold of and very helpful.
The reason I would mark them down by two points is that sometimes the system is a little bit automated, so it's hard to get to the person you want to talk to. They probably need more support staff, like with most companies. The response time can be a little bit slow sometimes.
Initial setup is very complex.
Every time we've deployed it, we've had to employ third parties to do it for us.
My view is that it's expensive, but it's the best.
I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.
Every time we've deployed it, it's fantastic. It works great. You just have to understand that it's complex, but all systems are complex. Palo Alto is complex, Arista is complex, Extreme Networks is complex.
I would never recommend Meraki to someone who only has 100 users. They would need to have 300 users. For a small number of users, it's expensive, it's complex, and you really need to be able to afford to pay someone who knows how to use it. If you have 300 users, you can have a full-time network engineer.
If you want the best and you have the money, then get it.