I am an IT Director at a school which has been Cisco for many years. Two years ago, we decided to replace aging Cisco switches and WiFi with Meraki equivalents. We trialed MS390, but at the time it was missing functionality we needed, so we deployed MS250/350. We needed to keep traditional Cisco switches at the core, to give flexibility around IPv6, complex ACLs, etc, so opted to migrate these to Cisco 9500 in our roadmap (as there are not Meraki equivalents). We really like Cisco's current direction of the travel, as we will now be able to integrate our Cisco 9500 core switches into the Meraki console for single-pane-of-glass network visibility / monitoring. Converged Cisco hardware, able to run IOS or Meraki, really makes sense at lots of levels. It gives customers choice and flexibility and simplifies supply chains, hopefully lowering costs. However, the bottom line here is that things will need to work far better than what has happened with MS390 which has been a "pilot" for converged Cisco/Meraki hardware. From what I can ascertain, MS390 is a rebadged 9300 running a Meraki management layer, and from discussion above doesn't seem like it has ever been properly stable.... I don't know what the problem is/was. Maybe the Meraki layer was simply "retrofitted" - so perhaps designing "ground up" in future with both usage cases in mind can yield better results. I want this to work, and certainly hope it will!
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