Cisco Meraki announces the end of sale for the following product MX65 and MX65W. The cloud-managed security appliances MX65 and MX65W have been replaced by the MX68 and MX68W, which have more capacity at the same price.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:
There are two types of licensing in MX. The Enterprise and Advanced Security licenses, with options of 1, 3, 5, 7 and 10 years.
The table below shows a 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 | ✔ | ✔ |
| VPN Client | ✔ | ✔ |
| 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 the SMB, MX68W with Advanced Security licensing and discuss the benefits:
- Next generation firewall, layer 7 “next generation” firewall, gives administrators full control over users, content and applications on their network.
- Application control
- Web caching
- Several WAN uplinks.
- Fault tolerance
- Content filtering
- Intrusion prevention, based on SNORT®.
- Antivirus and anti-phishing
- Web search filtering
Advantages over traditional firewalls:
- Centralized and simple management of all firewalls from a single administration portal. Managed 100% in the cloud, installation and remote administration are very simple.
- Traffic modeling and application management
- 3G / 4G Failover via USB modem
- Web caching
- Extremely simple and automated VPN management with no additional costs per user.
- Optimization of inter-site traffic with data compression, saving bandwidth and increasing speed.
- Prioritization of traffic by application to optimize Internet usage.
- Reports integrated into the management portal, without the need for additional installations.
- Proactive threat management.
