Robb Boyd and Jimmy Ray Purser decide where to dig around inside Meraki
“If it seems to good to be true…”
In this statement lies the central problem to a couple of guys with a career in networking: Meraki does some beautifully complex things…but in a deceivingly simple wrapper.
Meraki originally came on the scene with a new approach to cloud based wireless “as a service” that succeeded on a great many fronts. This success brought not just an acquisition, but subsequent forays into switching, routing and security. These are your core technologies – anyone in business is depending on these in some fashion..and the Meraki Cloud Model is now offering network sophistication in a greatly simplified package.
There is beauty in the simplicity. There is also a model for how and why the cloud matters. Yes there is hardware for every bit of the solution being offered but the true ‘service’ is delivered quite elegantly through the cloud. It enables a great many things in a manner that can make you wonder what you may be missing.
So this is what we do. We go to San Francisco, where it all began…and where these engineers continue to innovate. We peer through the clouds and show you what is going on so you can decide if it is right for you.
Where are the edges for Cisco’s On Premise technologies that offer many of the same features as Meraki?
Can you put your trust in something you cannot see?
Can you still do some of the more complex things your network demands?
Where do they go from here?
One of the bigger challenges right now within Cisco is how to position this technology. It is very complimentary to our core networking line but they remain a distinctly unique choice to make.
I really don’t envy the Cisco ISR team. It is really tough to be a leader and still out perform yourselves on a consistent basis. One could argue there is nowhere to go but down. I think is cool that TechWiseTV has been around long enough to chronicle the changes over time. Heck, many of our favorite engineers have been around the entire time as well..that gives us the unique ability to tell a story that can both respect and hopefully contrast the evolution in an appreciative way.
We recently had a chance to showcase the new ISR 4000 Series. ISR remains the acronym for this family as it stands in for ‘Integrated Services Router.’ I am sure we made this argument before, but one way to characterize this one is to see just how much the innovation swings towards the ‘I’ and the ’S’ these days. It makes sense. There is only so much one can do from a pure routing perspective, especially if you consider that speeds and feeds will grow naturally with the rest of the market and nobody pays the Cisco premium for just keeping up with the Joneses.
Initially, I was not too excited about doing a show on TAC, Cisco’s Technical Assistance Center. This topic has been requested in various forms throughout the years and for whatever reason, we just never took the time to do it right. Until now.
Cool thing about TAC as a subject for us? It is TECH Reality. This really can’t be a marketing show as they deal with deployments. As much as I could now make an argument for why they should be a part of any pre-sale process – I get it. They truly live at that golden moment…when someone has a problem and they are either going to become a customer for life…or be lost forever.
‘Service after the sale’ is something we all enjoy complaining about. While often the last thing we consider when making a purchase…it’s the FIRST thing we call out when it fails us.
Sure TAC does a great job, they have also developed some great models for managing high volume, high complexity change…a worthy goal for any customer service environment. I honestly did not realize just how much they do until we really dug into our research for this.
Traditional network security solutions have been built from disparate point technologies that create gaps in traditional defenses that sophisticated attackers exploit. With an integrated approach, organizations gain the full contextual awareness and dynamic controls necessary to automatically assess all threats, correlate intelligence, and optimize defenses to protect modern enterprise networks. An integrated threat defense also considers both network and endpoint perspective across the extended enterprise. Contrast this with point solutions that lack the visibility needed to spot multi-vector threats and to see what users, applications, content and devices are on the network and what each are doing.
In today’s dynamic network environment, point solutions lack the visibility and control required to implement effective security policy to accelerate threat detection and response. In addition, disparate solutions add to capital and operating costs and administrative complexity. They also result in higher implementation costs to integrate with the existing IT environment, work stream, and network fabric. By integrating defense layers, organizations can enhance visibility, enable dynamic controls, and provide advanced threat protection that address the entire attack continuum – before, during, and after an attack
Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services is a new, adaptive, threat-focused next-generation firewall that delivers superior, multi-layered protection, improves visibility, and reduces security costs and complexity. It provides integrated threat defense for the entire attack continuum by combining proven ASA firewall skills with industry- leading Sourcefire next-generation IPS and advanced malware protection.
TechWiseTV covered San Francisco to St. Louis for the reality of multi-site data center design.
One of the first things a good data center design strives for is availibility.
I know this is certainly not the only thing…but it is one of the most challenging aspects we like to address with networking. Two hurdles that make this interesting is the desire to balance geographic redundancy and workload mobility.
We had a lot of fun (as we do with most shows) mostly because of the experts we got to work with. Our primary Cisco expert was Cloud Architect Wayne Ogozaly who had written a blog series on a new Cisco Validated Design Business Continuity and Workload Mobility for Private Cloud. We chatted at length with him at Cisco Live San Francisco and then decided, that more of this story should be hands on…the best place to do that would be St. Louis. Home of many great things…but for us, home of the incredible Cisco partner, World Wide Technology (WWT).
WWT turned out to have a great group of really smart people who were ready to bend over backwards to help us.
