Meraki MX68 FireWall, Cloud Managed Security Appliance
Cisco Meraki announces end of sale for the next MX65 and MX65W product. Cloud Managed Security Appliances MX65 and MX65W have been replaced by the MX68 and MX68W, which have more capacity at the same price.
| Discontinued Model | New Replacement Model |
|---|---|
| MX65 -HW
MX65W-HW |
MX68-HW
MX68W-HW |
For the same cost, the Meraki MX68 provides more capacity:
| Recommended max clients | Interfaces | Stateful firewall throughput | Maximum VPN throughput | VPN tunnels | |
| MX65-HW | 50 | 12 × GbE (2 PoE +) USB 3G / 4G |
250 Mbps | 100 Mbps | 50 |
| MX68-HW | 50 | 12 × GbE (2 PoE +) 802.11ac WiFi USB 3G / 4G |
450 Mbps | 200 Mbps | 50 |
| MX65W-HW | 50 | 12 × GbE (2 PoE +) USB 3G / 4G |
250 Mbps | 100 Mbps | 50 |
| MX68W-HW | 50 | 12 × GbE (2 PoE +) 802.11ac / n Wave 2 WiFi USB 3G / 4G |
450 Mbps | 200 Mbps | 50 |
Types of licensing:
Comment that there are two types of licensing in MX. Enterprise licensing and Advanced Security, with options for 1, 3, 5, 7 and 10 years.
Next, we show in a table the comparison between the two licenses:
| Feature | Enterprise license | Advanced Security license |
| Stateful firewall | ✔ | ✔ |
| VLAN to VLAN routing | ✔ | ✔ |
| Link bonding / failover | ✔ | ✔ |
| 3G / 4G failover | ✔ | ✔ |
| Traffic shaping / prioritization | ✔ | ✔ |
| Site-to-site VPN | ✔ | ✔ |
| Client VPN | ✔ | ✔ |
| MPLS to VPN Failover | ✔ | ✔ |
| Splash pages | ✔ | ✔ |
| Configuration templates | ✔ | ✔ |
| HTTP content caching | ✔ | ✔ |
| Group Policies | ✔ | ✔ |
| Client connectivity alerts | ✔ | ✔ |
| SD-WAN. WAN optimization | ✔ | ✔ |
| Geography based firewall rules | ✔ | |
| Intrusion detection / prevention | ✔ | |
| Content filtering | ✔ | |
| Anti-virus and anti-phishing | ✔ | |
| Youtube for Schools | ✔ | |
| Web Search Filtering | ✔ | |
| AMP / Anti-malware | ✔ |
Finally we focus on what we consider a good product for SMEs, MX68W with Advanced Security Licensing we discuss the benefits:
- Next Generation Firewall, Layer 7 “next generation” firewall, gives administrators full control over the users, content and applications on their network.
- App control
- Web caching
- Multiple WAN uplinks.
- Fault tolerance
- Content filtering
- Intrusion prevention, based on SNORT®.
- Antivirus and antiphishing
- Web search filtering
Advantages over traditional firewalls:
- Centralized and easy management of all firewalls from a single administration portal. It is managed 100% in the cloud, installation and remote administration are very simple.
- Traffic shaping and application management
- 3G / 4G failover via USB modem
- Web caching
- Extremely simple and automated VPN management without additional costs per user.
- Traffic optimization between sites with data compression, saving bandwidth and increasing speed.
- Prioritization of traffic by applications to optimize Internet use.
- Reports integrated into the management portal, without the need for additional installations.
- Proactive threat management.
