Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

Formerly Cisco SD-WAN

Zero-touch enrollment

Routing

Dashboard

Firewalling

Given application visibility

Improve dashboard

The failover mechanism is great between the two circuits. We load balance between the gold and silver circuits. As you know, ISPs go down all the time, so the failover definitely keeps us up. We keep our SLAs for all of our end users and it's great.

The interfaces could definitely be a little bit more intuitive for people who don't understand what they're looking at. If you have a level one help desk, things like that, it gets real confusing for them real quick and they typically need to escalate higher to figure out, get time to resolution and things like that.

We are able to use a multiple different circuits to go into the cloud, so we are not relying on just one particular private wireless. We're relying on wine circuits, ethernet, ethernet out. So it provides us that flexibility where we didn't have that before. Provides security that is very robust and flexible and scalable and it provides us with, the biggest thing is redundancy, where we have backup. For example, we have a Starlink for nuclear power plants. If our main circuits go down, we have that. And without Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN it would be very hard to actually achieve, to accomplish true redundancy. So we're happy with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN in that regard.

So one of the frustrating things is that the name changes. This was a company that Cisco bought. We understand that, and everything was managed and whatever. Now everything changed, product line changed, and yet Cisco tax still calls it V managed. Sometimes it's just a little confusing. The name, the name of that. So that's the one thing that I would say. Keep it simple. We have way too many acronyms already that we try to remember in our industry. If you change the whole thing, it's very complicated for a lot of people. So keep it simple.

I will say the ease of use. I know it's very much a template based with feature templates and device templates when deployed properly. I truly believe that the tool can be very, very effective and actually quite robust for us to leverage for globally because we manage a lot of distribution centers and it's all over the world and a different environment in each and every location and obviously across the global markets as well. We've got a wide range of use cases and how it would be very beneficial to each of our business units that we support.

I will say the way we use it now, and I think what happened was the way it was deployed, it was fine, but unfortunately over the course of the years we've gotten a little out of hand with our device templates and feature templates. I think if there's any form of feedback that I would give to Cisco is how do we find ways to improve the environment as it stands so we get to a certain point with the environment and then we don't know how to undo it or fix it or optimize the environment. Because right now we're in a position where we're playing a lot of catch up and clean up and if there was a way or some tool or feature that we can take advantage of that would allow us to optimize that environment where we will kind of corner ourselves into a lot of problems in the future. There's some feature or something that we could take advantage of that will allow us to optimize that environment and not let it get out of control pretty easily. That would be my suggestion.

Our architecture topology is massive to having tools. The SD-wan devices per site. One the primary and one the second the backup up. And also the providers are full ancy on the one connection.

Maybe we are facing some issues with above on the current one version. Discussing that some interfaces cannot establish no negotiation. So we face that issue and the improvements should be maybe provide a new iOS version to fix this scope.

GUI

Dropdown

Organization

Functionality

Adaptable settings

Suggestions

Automated & updated custom layouts

Easy of use

Management of devices

Template use

GIU interfaces

Visibility of entire network path

Streamlined dashboards for better information

Enhanced tools for troubleshooting path issues

Separate the management configuration of traffic

More visibility of the traffic

Automatization

The configurations policy rules

Applications of templates

More information about the errors when we applied templates

Branch deployments (Zero-touch provisioning)

Software upgrades

Troubleshooting

Dashboards to alerts about potential impacts

For companies with presence in China, have alternatives due great China Firewall

Integrate manage with vAnalytics... to have a single point of access for both

Monitoring links

Easy operation

Reliable

Netflow observability

Software Upgrades

Configuration Deployment

Template Configuration

vManage provides a single organization plane

Templates are easy to navigate

Central Policy allows us to manage our devices

AAR helps us with failing over when we have trouble with our circuits

Switching in to CLI more seamlessly

We have to preform ugrades/ patches often

We have to port hop our 8300s frequently

Template-based configuration

Load-balance between ISPs

Overview of the entire WAN infrastructure

Renaming the names of the objects

Integration with other Cisco SD products

Better monitoring

Routing

Redistribution

AAR

Security logging

Central management

Encryption

Firewall services

reduces complexity

circuit monitoring

flexible scaling

preconfigured workflows

Sets config automatically to device

Policy is easy to apply

As for my company Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN fulfils all needs

Management

Operation

Security

Provisioning

Automation

AAR

Cloud on ramp

Policy based routing

VPN segmentation

SASE

Orchestrator monitoring capabilities

Licensing

On the box security

Orchestration

VPN security

template management

GUI

BUGS

Share internet IP subnet and no worry about IP

Simple to connect the sites

Templates made easy to onboard a site in few minutes

Best QOE

Application aware routing excellent

Moritoring and alerting

NAT for VPN

More simpler creating HuB and spoke

Automated WAN

Allows the client to increase WAN bandwidth without costing too much like legacy MPLS

VPN segmentation

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN routers can also connect to other third-party Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) providers such as Zscaler providing secured DIA

It was hard to catch up when I first joined the project as SD-WAN concept is different. That would be great if Cisco can introduce SD-WAN concepts better to the network engineers community to enable them to adopt easier.

Reliable

Improve

Scalable

Design

Style

Inter faces

Signaling

Data

Voice

QoS

Configuration

Support

Dynamic path selection

Zero touch provisioning

Application visibility

Complex configurations

Ease of Integrations