Hi,
Especially with the indicated size, I'd never go for Meraki... IMHO it's
not ready for enterprise scale and not even near the maturity for a
large, diverse and dynamic environment like the ones you'll find in
(higher) ed.
Meraki is *very* good at marketing though, I'll give them that.
I’ve looked at Meraki and it seems positioned at small installations, and once
you get to a certain number of AP’s, the conventional Cisco-based controller
(or similar vendor solution) comes our far less expensive.
For smartnet, you can realize significant additional savings over and above the
I use both- and have a real fondness for Meraki. Cisco vs Meraki is not just
Apples to Apples on hardware. With Meraki, the perpetual controller and NMS
bugs are no longer your problem, and it’s liberating beyond belief to not have
to deal with that. I might feel different if Cisco got their WLA
I would echo Lee's observations. Being an early adopter, Westmont had its
share of teething pains, but the benefits of Meraki managing the back-end
server are considerable. Our wireless deployment isn't massive: about 300
WAPs, and typically about 3000 devices attaching per day, and I'm sure we
a
Meraki generally works well at my previous site, Simon's Rock, though Simon's
Rock is very small, 125 APs. However, when things have problems, you don't get
much info from Meraki's event reporting system. Examples:
When we first switched to Meraki had APs that were losing connectivity due to a
+1 Meraki
We just broke 700 APs and have had very few problems over 5 years--none of
them show-stoppers. Lee's got it right, test drive everything. If you want
knobs and reporting go somewhere else. If you want hands-off manageability
look at Meraki.
Rand
Rand P. Hall
Director, Network Services
