GB WAN options

Red-Five
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GB WAN options

We're seeing GB WAN offerings ramping up in our rural area and I am struggling with the limitations of the small business applicable MX appliances and their inability to support that much bandwidth.  Does anyone know or heard if this is something Meraki is working on or has plans to address?  Or, is there some backdoor option vlan work around to use an LAN GB port for WAN traffic?

5 REPLIES 5
DarrenOC
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Kind of a big deal

Hi @Red-Five , UK based as well.  No backdoor options I’m afraid to LAN ports as a WAN port.  We’re stuck with the sizing limitations of each MX.

Darren OConnor | doconnor@resalire.co.uk
https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenoconnor/

I'm not an employee of Cisco/Meraki. My posts are based on Meraki best practice and what has worked for me in the field.
cmr
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Kind of a big deal

I also think that the CPU power might need increasing, we have a site with HA MX84s and 80Mb of streaming video over the SD-WAN keeps the CPUs at 50% load.  Therefore the MX84s look to at most be able to manage 150Mbps of SD-WAN traffic unless it isn't linear.

 

Firmware is 15.33

Thanks to both replies so far.

 

This is a great point.  Anyone know if Meraki is working on more robust hardware at the base MX levels on up, geared to handle higher bandwidth with all their security features working?

cmr
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@Red-Five id imagine it it more likely that the base speed might get nearer 1Gbps but it will reduce with all features enabled, as I mentioned elsewhere an MX84 has a base throughput of 500Mbps, VPN throughout of 250Mbps, but I'd estimate the CPU becoming pretty loaded at 150Mbps of SD-WAN throughput, based on 80Mbps using 50% CPU.

GIdenJoe
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Kind of a big deal

Are you in the position you actually need a sustained 1GB of WAN traffic

 

There is also no law that says that site-2-site traffic has to use the same appliance than internet/guest internet traffic.

 

You could very well have your core switching have internal routes pointing towards SD-WAN MX appliances (enterprise license) and have internet traffic pointing towards another pair of MX'es (different org with advanced license).

 

I know it is expensive but having a 1 GB link is an investment.

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