Networking leaders know that to deliver unified, differentiated experiences—remote, branch, in-store, and other, encompassing a myriad of applications—they need to stop thinking about the LAN and the WAN as silos. Instead, they must ensure experiences work across a global area network, spanning campus, branch, cloud, software as a service (SaaS), and other connections.

In this environment, the challenge IT leaders face is maintaining the quality of every experience across infrastructure they own and don’t own.

Resilience through digital experience assurance, simplified operations, and enhanced security

One company that is embracing this challenge is modern home furnishings and decor retailer Room & Board. Their challenge —and competitive advantage—is building strong relationships with customers throughout the design process, delivering exceptional experiences that span both digital and in-store interactions. To make good on that promise, they need to ensure a seamless, secure, and data-intensive experience, no matter how customers connect. In order to solve this complex problem, Room & Board needed a networking and IT platform that could give them visibility and control across the owned and unowned parts of their global network, simplified operations across sites, and the ability to ensure security and customer data privacy. They found the answer in Cisco Networking Cloud, the only IT platform that can deliver:

• Digital experience assurance with AI-insights, proactive and pre-emptive recommendations, and automated operations to help deliver flawless digital experiences
• End-to-end secure networking for consistent policy enforcement and automatic security measures—regardless of how users and devices connect across the digital landscape—by integrating networking and security
• Simplified, AI-native operations to help efficiently scale support and drive business resilience by unifying and automating operations throughout the owned and unowned digital landscape

At Cisco Live US, we are unveiling new capabilities for Cisco Networking Cloud designed to help our customers at any scale achieve more resilient digital experiences across their diverse networks.

Delivering assurance across the global area network

At the heart of our ability to provide Digital Experience Assurance (DXA) across the global area network is Cisco ThousandEyes. With Cisco ThousandEyes, IT teams can instantly see every network they rely on, owned or unowned, as if it were their own environment. With ThousandEyes, identifying issues anywhere along the digital delivery chain is not only automated but proactive, preemptive, and simpler.

And importantly, ThousandEyes enables closed-loop workflows that automate and accelerate critical remediation and optimization actions for our customers across all domains. Room & Board relies on ThousandEyes to provide visibility into the cloud-hosted and internet-enabled services that are outside of the company’s direct control.

“ThousandEyes helps us deliver the quality experience that we want to put forward to our employees and customers,” said Mark Rodrigue, a senior network engineer at Room & Board. “It’s enabled our customers to feel confident in their interactions with us.”

High throughput, end-to-end security with zero trust protections

When users and apps are connected across the global area network, IT teams need a more flexible and resilient WAN backbone to connect and protect every interaction on the network. A Cisco secure WAN edge is the backbone for the digital enterprise, combining high-performance routing, intelligent SD-WAN with integrated Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), and flexible multicloud connectivity in an architecture purpose-built to extend security and assurance to every touchpoint across the network.

Managed through Cisco Networking Cloud, this WAN architecture defends the entire network by consistently enforcing security policy across campus, branch, industrial environments, remote users, and the cloud. It’s perfect for customers of all sizes, from local retailer showrooms to a global network of bank branches.

At Cisco Live US, we’re debuting innovations across the WAN edge to help our customers build this critical backbone for today’s dynamic workforce and tomorrow’s AI-powered workloads.

• The new Cisco Catalyst and Meraki SD-WAN fabric interconnect allows IT teams to select the best WAN platform for every type of site they operate, without sacrificing security, simplicity, or scale.
• Cisco Meraki Secure Connect is now integrated with Cisco Secure Access, our powerful cloud-based security service edge (SSE) solution, to help connect and protect dynamic remote workforces in a zero-trust model. Along with powerful next-generation firewall (NGFW) capabilities powered by Cisco Talos, this native integration gives customers a seamless path to a unified, scalable SASE solution.
• The new Meraki MX650 extends the Meraki MX secure SD-WAN portfolio, more than doubling throughput for high-performance branch routing and security.

Simplified operations with drag and drop, point and click automation workflows

In today’s complex, distributed networks, making a config change or spinning up a new site can be time-consuming and accident-prone. But now even entry-level admins can confidently create and run complex, multi-step workflows across campus, branch, and data center environments with Cisco Workflows.

Cisco Workflows is the new automation and orchestration service at the heart of Cisco Networking Cloud. Workflows simplifies complex automation through a visual, low-code interface to help admins quickly and confidently configure, provision, and approve networking changes.

New services can quickly be created by connecting and creating automations across Cisco and third-party systems. A catalog of templates, distilled from Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs), is available with drag-and-drop features that make it easy to create and customize automations. With Cisco Workflows, there’s no need to move between different dashboards, so organizations can achieve business outcomes faster while reducing human error.

Innovations with an immediate ROI

Great digital experiences, simplified IT, and stronger end-to-end security. These are just some of the significant benefits companies can enjoy as we help you harness the power of the global area network. Learn more about how Cisco Networking Cloud can help you achieve resiliency through digital experience assurance, end-to-end secure networking, and simplified operations.

See how Cisco Networking Cloud can help you achieve unified, differentiated experiences.

The post Cisco Live 2024: Ensure Digital Resilience, Pervasive Security, and Simpler Operations appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

What is Virtual Stacking?

Virtual Stacking is an industry-first technology that provides centralized management for up to 10,000 switch ports. Unlike traditional stacking, virtually stacked switches do not require a physical connection, can be in different physical locations, and can be of different switch models, thereby simplifying large scale, distributed deployments.

What does this mean for you? If you have ever tried stacking traditional switches, you know about the expensive stacking modules, special cables, and the limit of the number of switches that you can manage through a single logical interface. This limitation makes managing large, distributed networks unnecessarily complex and expensive, with on-going OpEx needed to maintain all the network devices. With Meraki’s Virtual Stacking technology, managing large, distributed networks is as simple as managing an intuitive single pane-of-glass interface — the Meraki dashboard.

Single Pane-of-Glass Management

The Meraki dashboard gives you a holistic view of all the ports in your network. It doesn’t matter if the switches are located right next to each other or on different continents. Virtual Stacking give you unprecedented visibility and you can manage up to 10,000 switch ports as though the switches were physically stacked in the same room. For example, you can find all the ports across the network that are in VLAN 30, and then edit the entire group. Alternatively, you can enable/disable ports, turn PoE* on/off, define if ports are access/trunk ports, and assign VLANs.

The power and ease of managing individual ports or a group of ports is critical for scalable deployments, but Meraki’s dashboard takes it a step further and enables you to manage network-wide settings, such as defining QoS, spanning tree, and your management VLAN from the same single pane of glass.

If you do not see these features on your dashboard, you may require a firmware upgrade. Please contact support@meraki.com to schedule the upgrade.

Don’t forget to check out our new features under the Help > New features page regularly. We are constantly adding more exciting features and we’re expanding and improving existing features!

Finally, if you’re interested in seeing the MS Switch Dashboard, watch the demo at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KViCLMKXpkA

*PoE available on the MS22P and MS42P.

The post Virtual Stacking — the missing link in enterprise switch management appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

Event Logs

If you ever wanted to know all the changes that have happened on your switch network, our event log lets you view all the changes in your virtual stack to see events such as STP enabled/disabled, ports enabled/disabled, Live Tools tests that were run such as cable tests, and more. This gives you a historical view that’s useful if you want to correlate an event such as a network outage with configuration changes on your switches. You can find Event Log under Monitor>Event Log.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept of the virtual stack, this is an industry-first technology that provides centralized management of up to 10,000 switch ports. Unlike traditional stacking, virtually stacked switches can be in different physical locations, simplifying large scale and distributed deployments.

While our event log provides an easy way to see historical information, sometimes you need to do some live troubleshooting, and this is where the power of our Live Tools comes in.

Live Tools – Cable Test and Packet Capture

When it’s time for a network refresh, oftentimes you leave the existing wiring infrastructure in place and just replace your switches. This means that the quality of an Ethernet cable is unknown, and this could lead to hours of frustration when a user complains that their connection is down. You could spend hours debugging a healthy switch when the problem is simply a cabling issue. With our integrated cable test, you can quickly and easily see if the cabling is an issue or if it’s something more serious. You don’t need to be on site to run this test, and the end client doesn’t even need to be plugged in for it to work! You can find this useful tool in the Meraki dashboard under Monitor > Switches.

Event logs and cable tests are great for troubleshooting common networking issues, but what if you need to really dive into the bits and bytes of a packet? The MS Switches now have a powerful packet capture tool which lets you quickly and easily capture packets on one port or multiple ports for further analysis. You can even download the output as a PCAP file for analysis using Wireshark, a popular free network protocol analyzer. If you’ve ever tried capturing packets before, you know what a pain it is: you have to set up port mirroring, assign a new VLAN, and load specialized software on your laptop. With our packet capture tool, we make it one step and you can do it remotely from the comfort of your office or home! You can find the tool under Monitor > Packet capture.

If you do not see these features on your dashboard, you may require a firmware upgrade. Please contact support@meraki.com to schedule the upgrade.

Don’t forget to check out our new features under the Help > New features page regularly. We are constantly adding more exciting features and we’re expanding and improving existing features!

Finally, if you’re interested in seeing switches in the Meraki dashboard, watch the demo at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KViCLMKXpkA

The post Powerful troubleshooting at your fingertips appeared first on The Meraki Blog.