Meraki and Catalyst Living in Harmony

Since the Cisco acquistion of Cisco Meraki, I had seen them as separate entities from a standpoint of the products they develop and the solutions the produce. Recently, as especially seen in this #NFD33 presentation, we are seeing more and more cross-platform support between the business units. The interesting point to note here is that no specific features or products on the Meraki or Catalyst sides are going away in favor of solution centralization. The goal here really seems to be leveraging a best of both worlds approach.

Cisco has released the Catalyst Meraki 9300 line in which Catalyst 9300 switches can run in Meraki mode and be managed in the Meraki Dashboard. So does that mean that the traditional Meraki line of products is no longer going to be developed? Absolutely not, and quite the opposite, actually. What Cisco is doing here is supporting a new use case. They are supporting those larger enterprise use cases such as greater PoE and mGig requirements in a Meraki managed network.

To continue the conversation that the Meraki platform is not going anywhere, Cisco has released the MS130 platform included the first ruggedized Meraki switch, the MS130R.

Similar to the topic that Catalyst is not taking over the Meraki hardware platform in the enterprise space, Meraki is not trying to take over the Catalyst platform in the industrial space. There are certain use cases on the ruggedized side that Meraki is trying fill. The main use case to me seems to be providing a ruggedized solution for existing customers that already have a Meraki footprint and want to extend that into the ruggedized or IoT space where it makes sense. There are certain features such as Precision Time Protocol and Resilient Ethernet Protocol that are not supported at this time with Meraki and why the Catalyst Industrial Ethernet switches are still needed.

Adaptive Policy

Security should be paramount in any technology solution. Another topic covered in this Meraki #NFD33 presentation was Adaptive Policy. Adaptive Policy is Meraki's implementation of Cisco TrustSec.

Security Group Tagging is the major play here for enforcement, but Meraki also supports legacy enforcement mechanisms such as ACLs and VLAN changes. Another noteworthy point is the support of the TCP Established option so you can treat your policy as state based rather than having to write two-way stateless policies. That can help keep the policy cleaner.

More Possibilities

I do think that it is interesting and makes sense for Cisco to open up platform support between Meraki and Catalyst to provide flexibility to customers. Customers have the ability to choose the hardware platform that makes the most sense for each use case, but still manage the gear through the Meraki Dashboard. It is also good to see that Cisco is unifying the security solution across platforms.