Listen to "Benefits of Cisco Catalyst and Meraki Dashboard integration" on Spreaker.
The Meraki Dashboard is joining forces with Cisco Catalyst to bring cloud enablement capabilities alongside on-prem designs, creating a seamless integration that catches errors and allows for more predictive troubleshooting.
Shelby Skrhak speaks with Daniel Stewart, senior solutions center engineer at
Ingram Micro, about:
- Benefits of Cisco Catalyst and Meraki Dashboard integration
- Meraki Dashboard capabilities
- The Business Transformation Center
Benefits of Cisco Catalyst and Meraki Dashboard integration
The best of both worlds is here for software integration. While Catalyst and Meraki have historically been separate operations, their integration creates a new level of monitoring and tracking.
“What you gain [through integration] is the ability to see your catalyst switches in a Meraki dashboard to get visibility, like a network topology tree, visually seeing all of your switches in one map,” Daniel explains.
Whether a physical map on a floor plan or a logical map, any errors from all switches, VLAN ports, uplink interfaces and any issues that may exist between links pop out where they hadn’t been visible before.
Meraki Dashboard capabilities
Meraki rises to the occasion of assurance and high-level monitoring for health data entering a Catalyst environment.
“Meraki caters very well to a managed service customer.” Daniel shares, “Because of the cloud dashboard, I can see all my sites, my clients, my devices, anywhere in the world, no other software to deploy, it's easy to scale as an MSP with Catalyst.”
Having a full view of relevant information lends to more reliable predictive troubleshooting and less scrambling for solutions.
The Business Transformation Center
Our Business Transformation Center is in our Ingram Micro Buffalo, New York campus. We host a pseudo-production data center environment that operates as a set of outcome-based scenarios.
“We have a mock classroom, healthcare space, retail space and a working data center that we put on working outcomes and solutions, using the technology behind the scenes to deliver what those outcomes and public end-user facing consumptions would look like, and what problems can be solved by the adoption of this technology,” Daniel explains.
These mock environments run on a set of Meraki gear, with Catalyst running the infrastructure—all switches run seamlessly through Meraki, uncovering existing errors and allowing for improvement.
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