Meraki as CORE switch vs Regular managed switch

[kYutobi]

Now I have heard from many people (not in the community) that they won't ever use Meraki as a core switch. What are your opinions?

[ww]

for a branch i think its fine. for a DC you probably want to tune routing, timers etc for compatibility, and you dont want updates and reboots often. 

[BlakeRichardson]

I think it really depends on the network and what you want / need to do. We run 2 x MS425-32 in a stack configuration, we dont however use the core switches for our layer 3 routing as I wasn't happy with the limitations that Meraki has around L3 routing.

[PhilipDAth · Accepted solution]

I tend to use either Cisco Nexus Switches, Cisco Catalyst switches, or Cisco Meraki switches.  It just depends.

If the DC is only used say 18 hours a day, and scheduling in outages for regular firmware upgrades is not an issue then I'll use Meraki.

If the environment needs VRF, or has complex routing requirements then it'll be a Cisco Nexus or Cisco Catalyst solution.  If the environment needs absolute 24x7 uptime then I'll probably head towards a Catalyst chassis solution with dual supervisors.

[BrechtSchamp]

I'm with @PhilipDAth on this. Couldn't have said it better.

[kYutobi]

Thank you all for your input. I really appreciate the considerations and factors.