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My personal experience with Meraki has been the very definition of vendor lock-in. The security appliance was relatively cheap, then we saw the fine print that

My personal experience with Meraki has been the very definition of vendor lock-in. The security appliance was relatively cheap, then we saw the fine print that the total bandwidth was artificially limited and increased only adaquetly two product levels up. Sorry Mr BubbleTime, you need to buy a new applicance and a new license. Your old one is worth nothing and non-transferable, watch it rot. The switches seem absurdly expensive when you consider the 5-7 year licensing costs. And the quality is poor at best considering Meraki went and pushed a firmware update that bricked every fan in every 48 port switch we had. But you have the security appliance so it “only makes sense” to pay for these switches. We had an IPSEC incompatibility between a vendor with an ASA and our Meraki gear. The solution was to buy a Cisco device just for that one connection. All in all, it’s passable, but because of the lock-in it’s not like I have a cost effective choice to get away from it. I wouldn’t chose it again. That said, it does offer a mediocre IT tech a single pane of glass they have to try to mess up. Of all the Meraki factors I’ve learned and considered, that it is cloud-based is the least important towards my recommendation or lack of. There are lots of people that would be happy to explain all the ways my experience is wrong, but whatever. Short version, I wouldn’t do it again.

foobiekr 6y ago
Is there a community for this kind of discussion at this point? When I was an admin, and then later working in networking in the 2000s, there were tons of very active mailing lists, not just for hardcore networking but for IT-oriented stuff, mostly all faded to a shadow of their former selves. I'd be particularly interested in comparisons of Meraki/Mist/etc. for small enterprise and campus.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  Some of the relevant subreddits have decent discussions from time to time. The grandfather is /r/networking, but if you look at its sidebar, there's a long list of other subreddits for more specific subjects and individual brands. Stick to the subs for professionals rather than minor home network issues and you'll find quite a few knowledgeable people and plenty of anecdotes both good and bad about different brands etc.
  - foobiekr 6y ago
    thanks
jlawer 6y ago
Completely agree with the lock-in, and they aren't the best / featureful device out there. It seems the sweet spot for them is places with LARGE distributed footprints (such as retailers), where you can have very simple networking (some back to HQ, the rest to internet). It fits well with being able to rapidly bring bodies into a project and implement change X across hundreds of stores, while having a standing IT team of 5. If you have onsite (fulltime) IT, its likely not the best option.
Silhouette 6y ago
At this point, it feels like the reasons to use or not use Cisco for networking are much the same as the reasons to use or not use Oracle for databases. I'm not sure it has much to do with the technology in either case any more.
azernik 6y ago
"Cloud-based" is the implementation; the killer feature is the single pane of glass. It's just hard to implement that without putting a bunch of logic in the cloud. Last I worked at Meraki was 2015; I don't remember any artificial limiting of bandwidth at that time.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  "Cloud-based" is the implementation; the killer feature is the single pane of glass. It's just hard to implement that without putting a bunch of logic in the cloud. Hard in what way? As long as the control traffic has paths between all relevant devices over the management LAN, why does the cloud need to be used at all?
  - azernik 6y ago
    1. Putting the management UI on a local system requires some custom networking setup, and is full of security footguns. 2. Most customers who want this have multi-site setups; in that case, you need paths across the public internet too. Again security footguns, and also reliability ones. 3. Remote work is very very common for IT people. 4. Recovery from configuration mess-ups is harder if your control plane has to run on the same network that you've messed up. There are on-site controllers available. They've just lost out in the market because of the amount of in-house IT expertise they require. No one wants to deal with that shit, and outsourcing the security and reliability problems to a specialized third party is usually a good idea.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      This looks like an enterprise perspective. For smaller organisations operating on a single site, some of these concerns won't apply. I also think you're being a little one-sided there because cloud-hosted configuration has its own risks in terms of security and accidentally cutting off your management access, many of them directly analogous to the ones you mentioned, plus you have all the usual concerns about any critical system that depends on Internet connectivity to work properly. At the end of the day, nothing is more reliable than local wired networking, and nothing is more flexible for disaster recovery than having someone physically on-site. In the prosumer to small business segment, I would argue that there is still enormous potential value in being able to configure all of the network gear from a single GUI, not least because it doesn't then require a lot of in-house networking expertise to get something going that works and is reasonably secure.

foobiekr 6y ago

Is there a community for this kind of discussion at this point? When I was an admin, and then later working in networking in the 2000s, there were tons of very active mailing lists, not just for hardcore networking but for IT-oriented stuff, mostly all faded to a shadow of their former selves. I'd be particularly interested in comparisons of Meraki/Mist/etc. for small enterprise and campus.

Silhouette 6y ago
Some of the relevant subreddits have decent discussions from time to time. The grandfather is /r/networking, but if you look at its sidebar, there's a long list of other subreddits for more specific subjects and individual brands. Stick to the subs for professionals rather than minor home network issues and you'll find quite a few knowledgeable people and plenty of anecdotes both good and bad about different brands etc.
- foobiekr 6y ago
  thanks

jlawer 6y ago

Completely agree with the lock-in, and they aren't the best / featureful device out there. It seems the sweet spot for them is places with LARGE distributed footprints (such as retailers), where you can have very simple networking (some back to HQ, the rest to internet). It fits well with being able to rapidly bring bodies into a project and implement change X across hundreds of stores, while having a standing IT team of 5. If you have onsite (fulltime) IT, its likely not the best option.

Silhouette 6y ago

At this point, it feels like the reasons to use or not use Cisco for networking are much the same as the reasons to use or not use Oracle for databases. I'm not sure it has much to do with the technology in either case any more.

azernik 6y ago

"Cloud-based" is the implementation; the killer feature is the single pane of glass. It's just hard to implement that without putting a bunch of logic in the cloud. Last I worked at Meraki was 2015; I don't remember any artificial limiting of bandwidth at that time.

Silhouette 6y ago
"Cloud-based" is the implementation; the killer feature is the single pane of glass. It's just hard to implement that without putting a bunch of logic in the cloud. Hard in what way? As long as the control traffic has paths between all relevant devices over the management LAN, why does the cloud need to be used at all?
- azernik 6y ago
  1. Putting the management UI on a local system requires some custom networking setup, and is full of security footguns. 2. Most customers who want this have multi-site setups; in that case, you need paths across the public internet too. Again security footguns, and also reliability ones. 3. Remote work is very very common for IT people. 4. Recovery from configuration mess-ups is harder if your control plane has to run on the same network that you've messed up. There are on-site controllers available. They've just lost out in the market because of the amount of in-house IT expertise they require. No one wants to deal with that shit, and outsourcing the security and reliability problems to a specialized third party is usually a good idea.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    This looks like an enterprise perspective. For smaller organisations operating on a single site, some of these concerns won't apply. I also think you're being a little one-sided there because cloud-hosted configuration has its own risks in terms of security and accidentally cutting off your management access, many of them directly analogous to the ones you mentioned, plus you have all the usual concerns about any critical system that depends on Internet connectivity to work properly. At the end of the day, nothing is more reliable than local wired networking, and nothing is more flexible for disaster recovery than having someone physically on-site. In the prosumer to small business segment, I would argue that there is still enormous potential value in being able to configure all of the network gear from a single GUI, not least because it doesn't then require a lot of in-house networking expertise to get something going that works and is reasonably secure.