Project Planning

[athornfam3]

Hi all... I've taken on a role at a new org. One of the items I want to take care of is get their Firewall/Routers, Switching, AP's, and Camera's into one centralized area for a few reasons... We are coming from Dell Sonicwalls, Cisco ISR MPLS at a few sites, Netgear (staples hardware), Ubiquiti AP's, and a mishmash of IP cam vendors. Its everywhere basically.

I'm looking to pilot Meraki at one of our manufacture plants (Agriculture - Farming) which would then be duplicated at the rest of the facilities (19 of them). We have 2 offices and a colocation that will get higher spec'd hardware but wanted to see what everyone's thoughts were or what questions they would ask themselves when engineering this out.

[DarrenOC]

Soooo many different ways of approaching this.  As a consultancy company we would ask for network diagrams, IP schemas. Then follow up with a site survey to actually see what’s in-situ. Whilst on site we would look through the configurations, look at network utilisation, security etc etc. State of network cabling, fibres, Is a wireless survey required, location of cameras.

Im sure your Meraki AM would provide some trial eqpt to help you on your way with the project

Best of luck

[cmr]

@athornfam3 as @DarrenOC said, there are lots of options even within the Meraki family.  If you want an idea before speaking to a Meraki account manager, can you give us more details about the site you want to start with?

[PhilipDAth]

I think I would start with - the requirements.  Maybe what you have no longer meets the current company requirements, or won't meet them during the next three years.  There has been a lot of change lately.

So maybe start with a clean sheet of paper, forget what you have for a moment, and figure out:

• Are there any specific business requirements that your network needs to support (could be cloud computing, remote workers with tablets, critical 24x7 manufacturing, specific application, etc).
• What are the things your current network is not doing well?
• What are the network clients (are they local WiFi users, are they IoT sensors, are they remote VPN users, etc).
• What do you see as you major data flows?  For example, is everything hosted in the cloud or a DC, so all client data needs to go to and from that location; or do you need to shift a lot of data around on each site as well.
• In the same vain as above, what are the key applications the users will be using?

[athornfam3]

@PhilipDAth Appreciate that. That's the type of information I'm looking for.

I guess focusing on Firewalls... What would be the questions you would ask yourself? I was thinking of these questions myself.

* What is your ISP bandwidth speed and do you need that full speed? Yes or No

* What is the consistent bandwidth usage?

* Do we need Advanced Security?

* How many users and devices at the site?

* Are we going to full tunnel VPN traffic or Split tunnel?

* What is our growth rate to size for the future?

* Do we want to content filter on?

What I'm thinking with previous experience from an MSP... The larger 5+ building sites would consist of an MX100 in an HA and the satellite sites would probably be an MX68 with a Cradlepoint. I can't say much for details because I've only been here for 3 weeks but I'd like to get this going soon... We can't work efficently with Sonicwalls, 50 PtP bridges, Netgear (staples switching) and Ubnt AP's.