Meraki Dashboard with Cloud Management for Cisco Catalyst Devices
In the nearly ten years since Cisco’s acquisition of Meraki, one thing has been very clear: IT admins want to be able to leverage the Meraki Dashboard and their other Cisco technologies together more fluidly, especially when it comes to their network infrastructure.
Last month at Cisco Live in Las Vegas, we announced that Cisco has taken a massive step forward on this front by bringing Catalyst 9000 switching and wireless platforms into the Meraki Dashboard for the first time. In the very near future, organizations will have three ways to benefit from the power of both Catalyst hardware and the Meraki Dashboard:
Cloud Monitoring for Catalyst, which delivers network visibility, telemetry, and troubleshooting for IOS-XE devices from the Meraki Dashboard. Support for fixed-port Catalyst 9000 switches is available now, but chassis switches and wireless platforms will be coming as well.
A new management migration capability for Catalyst Switching to allow you to adopt full cloud management from the Meraki Dashboard without having to replace your switching hardware, starting with the Catalyst 9300 later this year.
New Wi-Fi 6E access points that can operate in two modes: either as on-prem managed APs via 9800 controllers and DNA Center, or as cloud-managed APs via the
Meraki Dashboard. Similar to manage migration for switching, if your needs change over time these access points can be migrated between management modes.
So WHY THIS and WHY NOW?
Cisco Catalyst technology remains the most powerful campus and branch networking platform and fastest growing product on the market. Also, Meraki dashboard continues to be the simplest cloud management platform, with the highest adoption and deployment on the market. How can we bring things together and give our customers the best of both worlds? Enter Cloud Management and Monitoring for Catalyst. Simplicity without compromising.
And HOW to get started?
Today we have an on-premises management offering through Cisco DNA Center, which is a do-it-yourself high-touch approach. There are now two ways to implement this: in addition to existing Cisco DNA Center physical appliances that come in multiple sizes and flavors, we announced at Cisco Live the Cisco DNA Center Virtual Appliance, which runs as VMware ESXi instances in private data centers or as a virtual machine in public cloud platforms starting with AWS.
We also have Cisco Meraki Cloud Management which provides low touch, and simplicity as Meraki’s slogan’s: Simplicity at Meraki stands for everything from how we approach product development to user experience.
For more information, please contact us at: info@samawave.com
