Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Reviews

Our primary use case generally relates to customers looking to reduce their MPLS costs. In addition, many of our customers are moving to the cloud, which can handle both on-prem and cloud services, a hybrid solution. Finally, some of our customers are looking to move towards new technologies and will choose this solution, but the primary use cases are the first two - reduction of MPLS costs, using multiple modes of transport, and managing and control of technologies.

We deal mainly with large enterprise companies. A few years ago customers were not aware of SD-WAN or they were not looking to migrate to SD-WAN, but now whenever there is talk around WAN, 95% of the customers are moving to SD-WAN.

I think segmentation is a valuable feature that the product provides. I think the segmented traffic it provides is the best in the industry right now.

The product is not a cheap solution and could be improved by lowering the cost. Most customers who do not buy Cisco give their primary reason as cost. If the cost was reduced then I think we'd be able to sell more. Vendor log in could also be improved. There are a lot of solutions on the market now that are open solutions, meaning boxless solutions. You don't really need to buy the box that Cisco provides. You can upgrade to SD-WAN using the open solutions. Cisco could provide a full mobile solution but I don't think they'll do that because selling their hardware on top of the software is their bread and butter, .

Before SD-WAN came in they provided quite a few features. For example, a lot of customers were using Cisco's router and voice gateway which has not been available since the launch of SD-WAN. They are still working on restoring it. It's one of the key issues with the Cisco SD-WAN solution that would be a good additional feature. Whatever features were supported before are not supported in the SD-WAN solution now. If they could incorporate all those features for customers that would be a big improvement. 

I've been using SD-WAN for about two and a half years. We always pitch the latest version of the product. 

The stability of SD-WAN on iOS needs improving, they're in a transition phase. Cisco recently acquired Repeller. They are gradually migrating from their old SD-WAN to this new retail SD-LAN. It's been a challenge because the roadmaps they envisaged haven't quite worked out, it's not a smooth road. If you change from traditional WAN to SD-WAN from the retailers perspective, it can be a bit of a challenge. We also deploy Fortinet and that's easier. I don't know what's going to happen in the next couple of years, but for now, doing SD-WAN is a little bit of a challenge

If you can get to the first step of migration and to stable operations then the scalability is not a challenge. The Cisco solution is pretty scalable. I think it's the most scalable solution in the market, but it has to setup properly. Once it's set up properly. Then scalability is not a challenge. Scalability is more of a challenge with products like Fortinet. The initial migration to SD-WAN is more of a challenge here.

Technical support is very good, better than most of the vendors in the market, but they charge for it. 

It depends on the customer. For smaller and medium-sized customers, it's not that difficult. But recently I have faced problems in migrating because it's where some of this new Cisco iOS is SD-WAN. It seems to be a bit unstable moving to it. All these complexities make migration difficult. It's not a cakewalk.

Again, deployment time depends on the customer and size of the company. It's hard to generalize. I'm from the presale team so we don't implement. We have another team dealing with implementation and there are around eight people in that team. 

The solution is not cheap.  Most customers are now moving from an APEX spending model to an OPEX spending model. The licenses are pretty expensive. There are additional support costs which is not inexpensive. Licensing, support, product, technology, and everything in the Cisco SD-WAN solution costs. I think it's the most expensive solution on the market.

It's important to realize the product has two layers, the underlay, and the overlay. The controller is in the overlay and the underlay is the physical devices. Most of those are on-prem, but the controller is mostly on the cloud. That's what most people prefer.

In terms of size, different customers have different migration plans and different approaches. For example, Cisco has the Meraki SD-WAN solution, and then they have the retailer SD-WAN solution. The question is which solution fits the customer best. I would advise them on that aspect first before deciding whether they go for a Meraki solution or a retailer solution. The second aspect, of course, is the budget. How much does the customer want to spend? And the third would be to ascertain their internal skill set on deploying, managing, and operating the SD-WAN solution. If the skill set is in-house then good for them, they can go ahead. But if not then I would propose a managed SD-WAN solution where maybe, for example, our company provides managed SD-WAN solutions for some Cisco products. The third thing I would advise for global customers is to decide if they want to deal with the last mile connectivity themselves or find a partner to do that for them. Security would be a final consideration and that depends on setup and scale. 

I would rate this product a seven out of 10, it hasn't quite made it for me to be rated higher. I'd like to see some improvement. 

I recently provided Cisco SD-WAN to one of my customers for the first time. This customer had a traditional network and had been happy with the conversion to a software-defined WAN.

The introduction of Cisco SD-WAN, has make some greate change to our organization in terms of acquiring new knowledge as we are a cisco premium partner, we have to take some training on SD-WAN to understand the knowledge so that it will be easy for us to sell and implement to the end customer

So far, the feature that I like best is the policy configuration manager. It is better than performing a manual configuration.

It would be very helpful if we had better access to a knowledge base, or online documentation, to help both us and our customers learn to use this solution.

I have been working with Cisco SD-WAN and doing online training for the past year.

Cisco SD-WAN is a stable network solution.

This solution is super scalable. Most of our clients are midsize and enterprise-level organizations. These include banks, social security funds, educational institutions, government departments, community groups, and agencies. 

I have not contacted Cisco support specifically about SD-WAN, but I have dealt with them on other occasions and they are good. I would rate them a seven out of ten. Overall, I am satisfied with the support.

Most of our customer using traditional WAN technologies and we are the one configuring and deploying those solution, now we are on the way of educating them the importance of SD-WAN and finally implenting it

The initial setup is somewhat complex, although we are currently learning about this solution. In our country, most of the customers do not know much about this type of technology, and we are the ones who are propagating Cisco SD-WAN. When it comes to the setup, it is not like a traditional, manual configuration.

Level of expertise is good as mos to cisco engineer are certified in specific area 

Not yet calculated

Setup cost is reasonably standard as it gives a complete WAN link utilization with perfomance of QoS

Yes SD-WAN offered with VMware

This is a good product and I totally recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I primarily use this solution for remote connectivity.

In a software-defined network architecture, it heals itself and the management of the solution is very easy.

This solution is expensive so pricing is a concern.

I have been using Cisco SD-WAN for about one year.

We have had no issues with stability.

This solution can scale from SMB to the enterprise level. It is very impressive.

Scalability in this context does not concern users, but connections between the head office and branch offices. We do not deal with endpoints or end-users.

We do not have plans for expansion or increasing our usage at this point.

I have contacted technical support several times during the deployment phase and while troubleshooting. They are amazing. They are really helpful and the support is perfect.

We have only ever used Cisco solutions.

The initial setup is straightforward.

For a regular customer, the deployment will probably take between 15 and 20 days.

We deploy these types of products for our clients.

This is a good solution. It's a new technology that people should look into because it provides for seamless management of the whole network, including switches. That said, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Viptela (router) SDN-based services:

• Hybrid networking.
• Combination of low-cost appliances and virtualization.

While it is not implemented in our organisation, I have been looking in SDN for quite a while and had some concern about hype and buzz words surrounding development of the subject.

With Viptela (Cisco is buying this start up), it is the golden average on what I would like to see in SDN implementation.

I have not used it yet.

Stability (especially running in virtualized environment) is an issue SDN vendors do not talk about until customer learns the hard way. It has to be tested.

Scalability is a strong selling part of virtualized solutions. I hope it is the case for Viptela; something to test.

This is definitely a product worthy of being evaluated and tested.

The attractive part is a combination of low-cost appliances and virtualization.