Everybody is excited about the new Meraki firewalls: the Meraki MX75, MX85, MX95, and MX105. It’s not news to anybody that Meraki has developed an unprecedentedly easy-to-navigate ecosystem for its’ products to co-exist in. And this cloud-based, centrally managed platform has only grown in size and maturity. Over time, a growing, increasingly-loyal customer base have simply come to expect their Merakis to be simple to set up, easy to use, and a breeze to manage. Well, the Meraki MX105 is no different!
The MX105 is a predictably friendly appliance that puts non-IT types at ease with it’s ‘snap’ deployment. In fact, the Meraki MX105 can be installed in seconds, and is completely cloud-managed. At that point, it then gets all of its firmware upgrades through an SSL connection. The VPN can be set up in 5 minutes. And since the MX105 is 100% cloud managed, installation and remote management is simple.
This is an enterprise security appliance. It’s designed for distributed deployments that require remote administration across mid-branch environments. It is ideal for network administrators who don’t have a lot of time to spend on set-up and management.
Performance
Unlike many vendors, Meraki tends to refine and perfect it’s models over time, rather than sort of re-inventing them with new models. So the MX105 does everything the MX100 does, just better. Both have hands-off set-up, stateful firewall, Layer 7 application visibility, traffic shaping, and content filtering. But where the MX100 pushes 750 Mbps of Stateful Firewall Throughput, the MX105 reaches 3 Gbps. VPN Throughput for the MX100 is up to 500 Mbps, for the MX105 its 1 Gbps. Advanced Security Throughput is 1.5 Gbps for the MX105. The MX105 can support up to 750 users, the MX100 supports 500.
The interfaces are a little different; the MX100 has 9x GbE and 2x SFP USB 3G/4G ports. On the other hand, the MX105 has 2x 10GbE SFP+ and 2x 2.5GbE RJ45 (1x PoE+) WAN ports, as well as 4x GbE RJ45, 2x 10GbE SFP+ USB 3G/4G LAN ports.
Features of the Meraki MX105
The MX series has a ton of features. These include SD-WAN, application-based firewalling, content filtering, web search filtering. Plus, there’s SNORT® based intrusion detection and prevention, Cisco Advanced Malware Protection, and 4G cellular failover. This comprehensive approach to network services eliminates the need for multiple appliances.
Like everything else, the MX105 is managed via Cisco Meraki Dashboard. Because of this, you will receive automatic firmware upgrades. It is an L3/L7 stateful firewall, with Automatic WAN Failover, and SD-WAN is available with Meraki AutoVPN.
You’ll also get Content Filtering and Malware Protection w/ optional Threat Grid integration.
What is Threat Grid Integration?
Glad you asked. Cisco Threat Grid is a huge, unified threat intelligence and malware analysis platform. It is tightly integrated with Cisco’s Advanced Malware Protection solution. It runs automated analysis and produces human-readable reports with behavioral indicators for each file submitted.
Threat Grid analyzes suspicious files against more than 950 behavioral indicators and a malware knowledge base sourced from around the world. It provides industry-leading accuracy and context-rich threat analytics. This is quite a powerful resource that is available to Meraki users, and a big benefit of Meraki’s being under the Cisco umbrella.
Licensing
The licensing structure for MX105, and all MX appliances, is the same as that of any other Meraki device–1:1 ratio of devices to licenses. They are, in ascending order, Enterprise, Advanced Security, and Secure SD-WAN Plus. Just pick the best license for your use case. And, as always, Corporate Armor is always happy to help with this process.
Corporate Armor has a team of experienced, certified Meraki specialists who are ready to guide you in the direction that’s best for you. So reach out here, or call 877-449-0458. Thanks for reading!
Meraki MX105 highlights
| 3 Gbps Stateful Firewall Throughput |
| 1 Gbps VPN Throughput |
| 1.5 Gbps Advanced Security Throughput |
| Supports 750 users |