

Which Gartner rated SD WAN & SASE Solutions are best for your business requirements?
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Book nowCisco Viptela and Meraki offer the capability to deploy SD WAN services across Global SMEs and large business. Deciding on which solution is suited to your business requires an understanding of their respective strengths vs business requirements together with WAN costs for TCO.
At a high level, the Viptela proposition offers a more granular approach to networking, meaning large complex Enterprise requirements are instantly better suited to a Viptela SD WAN deployment. With deep packet inspection, support for advanced routing and sophisticated orchestration, Viptela is highly configurable vs Meraki which, to a certain extent, works out of the box. Meraki is ideal for fairly standard requirements to meet the majority of branch office needs with easy to configure wireless.
We often view Viptela WAN services as a co-managed or even fully managed due to the added complexity required to make the most from deployments, whereas Meraki is often DIY as the configuration is simplified in comparison.
The typical questions which arise begin with a discussion on how many links does your business need to support for load balancing or redundancy. At the most basic level, Meraki supports dual WAN circuits vs Viptela which is able to support additional requirements. It is also important to note that Meraki appliances will only support technologies such as 4G (and 5G) as a backup, Viptela will support cellular wireless as a primary which can be used for load balancing.
Viptela is also deployed within Data center based SD WAN solutions or as a component of Cloud architecture. Where your business is building out a complete SD WAN capability, the need to control your actual infrastructure is often a base architectural requirement. Viptela is strong in this respect and can be hosted within your own private cloud infrastructure as a physical appliance or NFV installation where required.
If your network topology requires network segmentation - individual IPSec VPN services built from specific hosts or devices - Viptela will support the ability to separate these VPN tunnels vs all other traffic. On the reverse side, Meraki only supports single VPN topology deployments in a hub and spoke or full mesh VPN tunnel configuration.
Viptela is the closest alternative product to private based MPLS VPN services. QoS app performance is achieved via WAAS (Cisco TCP WAN acceleration and optimization built in) together with the ability to detect network issues and public cloud path selection for SaaS application performance. As an example, Viptela is able to calculate the best possible path to application resources on an almost real time basis. Meraki will monitor application behavior using the insight license but will not actually adapt and make decisions.
Prior to the Cisco acquisition of Meraki in 2012, the technology was focused on cloud-managed wireless. As of writing this article, Meraki is designed to offer the capability to meet almost every networking outcome. With their Meraki Dashboard, businesses can manage indoor and outdoor WiFi access points, routing, switching and security elements of networking. Meraki offers the ability to manage thousands of endpoints as a full-stack service offering. Other options include Cisco Umbrella which offers protection for users against ransomware and malware without adding increased latency.
Viptela currently provides Software-Defined Wide Area Networking to many of the Fortune 500 companies. The original goals for Viptela engineers was to remove the WAN from the physical connectivity (underlay) providing an overlay across the complete network regardless of connection. Security and network segregation are big wins for Viptela which is one of the reasons why larger organizations with complex requirements will opt for a bespoke deployment. With layer 4 to 7 awareness, third party network services can also be directed under a single global SD WAN policy.
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