We’ve got two big announcements today for our enterprise customers – significant new product features, and a lifetime warranty on all indoor enterprise access points!
Lifetime Warranty on Indoor Enterprise APs
We put a lot of care into building solid, high-quality products. We think our APs should last a lifetime, and now we’re putting our money where our mouth is.
Effective immediately, all of our enterprise-class indoor access points – including our most popular model, the MR14 – are covered by a lifetime warranty. This upgraded coverage applies retroactively to existing units as well as to new purchases, and is free of charge.
We’re also offering free advanced shipping – a first in our industry. This means that if your access points need replacement, we’ll ship out new units immediately, rather than waiting to receive your APs before sending out replacements.
Since we’ve seen very few failures, these new policies won’t affect the vast majority of you. But we hope that these policies will make infrastructure budget planning easier for some, and add peace of mind for all.
New Enterprise Features
We’ve been working hard on new features for our enterprise products and we’re excited to announce that they’re available for you to use on your networks today.
Network Analytics
We now automatically generate periodic analytics reports of the activity on your wireless network. These reports show the usage and reliability of the wireless network, bandwidth trends, device popularity, mobility, and more. These are great for network operators, as well as their staff and management. We’ve even had beta users post parts of the reports to their blogs. Wondering which operating systems are most popular on the Stanford Computer Science department’s wireless network? See here. (Hint – Apple is taking over the world.)
Check out a complete sample, from Stanford’s Computer Science Department:
Rogue AP Detection
This feature protects against 2 kinds of security risks. In one, a hacker can place an access point near your network that broadcasts the same SSID as your legitimate device. If users inadvertently connect to it, they could enter sensitive information (like their network login) into the malicious device. In the second case, one could plug a wireless access point into the wired LAN, without the appropriate encryption and access control – providing an opening into your network. More often than not, this is done by an employee who does not know that he is putting the network at risk.
These two types of “rogue APs” can be detected with dedicated software tools – provided you physically walk around your coverage area with a laptop. We’ve integrated rogue AP detection into our access points and monitoring software, so the Meraki network can continually monitor the airwaves for you and alert you upon signs of trouble.
Here at Meraki’s San Francisco office, our engineers plug in test devices left and right, giving a fertile testing ground for this feature:
Event Logging
We now expose fine-grained event logs in the Meraki Cloud Controller, giving precise visibility into where, when, and how devices are connecting to the network, and aiding in troubleshooting and device tracking.
Support for 15 SSIDs
We’ve upped the maximum number of SSIDs from 4 to 15. While most customers have one SSID for their secure corporate network, and another open network for guests, some of our users have dedicated virtual networks for specialized equipment and devices, SSIDs with different bandwidth limits, etc. Westmont College, one of our customers whom we’ve mentioned on the blog before, has an SSID for their WiFi-controlled HVAC system, and Stanford’s Computer Science department has a dedicated SSID for their experimental robots! Now that we support 15 SSIDs, you can have a dedicated SSID for your wireless toaster oven and not run out.
Availability (and the beauty of SaaS)
Since the Meraki Cloud Controller is a cloud-based software service, these features (and many other improvements) are available immediately – with no upgrades to purchase, and no software to download or install.
Within the next few days and weeks, we’ll dive deeper into some of these features here on the blog – exploring use cases, tips, and tricks. In the mean time, give them a spin on your networks!
Meraki had a blast at last week’s IT Roadmap Expo, hosted by Network World. For this expo we brightened up our booth with a dunk tank! Our office in SF is terrorized by Nerf darts – we thought we’d bring a few out to the Expo for some fun, and show off the impeccable waterproofing of the Meraki Outdoor. Attendees who shot the (lit up) Meraki Outdoor into the water tank were entered into a raffle for a pair of iPod Touches. Congrats to winners Anthony and Yuan – enjoy the iPods (or one less item on your holiday shopping list).
Aside from the entertainment and errant splashes, we were excited to show off our products to the attendees. As always, it was energizing to see their faces light up as we demoed the Cloud Controller dashboard. We were also happy to see several of our customers drop by and say hi.
We’ll be out on the road again soon, and hope to see some of you – keep checking back for updates! In the meantime, here’s a short recap of the event:
We are pleased to announce that Techworld has awarded Meraki the 2009 Mobility/Wireless Product of the Year for the MR14 dual-radio 802.11n access point. I had the opportunity to travel to London to receive our award, meet the judges and award recipients, and be interviewed by Techworld.
Techworld’s review of Meraki, which appears below from their website, speaks for itself. The full list of award winners is available here.
Thanks to Techworld for the recognition! We are humbled and honored to have been selected out of a field of such distinguished candidates.
If you’ve ever attended a big conference and had trouble connecting to the wireless or found it to be slow and unreliable, you are not alone. Providing fast, reliable wireless for conferences where you have hundreds, even thousands of demanding users with multiple devices each Tweeting, downloading video and blogging can be very challenging.
Meraki, in conjunction with British Telecom, is currently providing wireless for the two-day LeWeb conference, which started today in Paris. LeWeb is an annual tech conference that brings together tech luminaries, entrepreneurs, investors, technophiles and bloggers to discuss wide-ranging topics and to network. There are over 2,000 attendees this year, all expecting reliable access to fast WiFi. This photo (courtesy of Robert Scoble) perfectly illustrates why this event would put any wireless network to the test! Check out all the iPhones and laptops (Interesting note: Over 23% of the clients on the network are Macs and 25% are iPhones, so almost half of all client devices are Apple products)! As you can see every user has more than one wireless device….
So far tweets from the conference are raving about the speed and reliability of the wireless. Here is a shot of the usage graph in Dashboard, showing peak usage of almost 100 Mbps!
Here is a shot of the network on the main event floor in Dashboard, showing how most of the 28 APs are deployed:
This is a great example of how scalable Meraki networks are, as well as how easy and fast they are to deploy and configure. The entire network was deployed in about one workday!
Stay tuned for more updates from LeWeb….
-Posted by Greg Williams
Update, Kiren Sekar, December 15th 2009:
The conference has wrapped up but praise of the wireless keeps pouring in! Tara Hunt’s blog listed highlights from the conference. Number four made us downright delighted:
Last week, Westmont College was named to the prestigious InfoWeek 100 list. InfoWorld 100 recognizes IT organizations that “implemented and integrated technologies in innovative ways in pursuit of concrete business goals.”
Westmont is a top-tier liberal arts college in Santa Barbara, California. One of seven colleges and universities named to the InfoWorld 100, Westmont was recognized for transforming its IT infrastructure into a cloud-centric one. This project integrated cloud services from Google, Postini, and Salesfore.com, as well as a campus-wide Meraki 802.11N network. In implementing Meraki, Westmont became both one of the first universities to deploy 802.11n campus-wide, and to deploy a cloud-controlled wireless LAN.
We were thrilled when Westmont chose Meraki (especially after a thorough bakeoff with Cisco and Aruba!) and we’re just as excited to see them recognized publicly for their vision and execution. And we’d be remiss not to congratulate Novacoast, an IT professional services firm and one of our close partners, who managed the installation.
If you’re curious about Westmont’s experience with Meraki, you can check out our Cloud Controller Tour that features Westmont’s network, and watch a short interview with their CIO, Reed Sheard. Read about Westmont and the other InfoWorld 100 winners here.
Once again, congrats to the Westmont team!
-Posted by Kiren Sekar
Last week, Westmont College was named to the prestigious InfoWorld 100 list. InfoWorld 100 recognizes IT organizations that “implemented and integrated technologies in innovative ways in pursuit of concrete business goals.”
Westmont is a top-tier liberal arts college in Santa Barbara, California. One of seven colleges and universities named to the InfoWorld 100, Westmont was recognized for transforming its IT infrastructure into a cloud-centric one. This project integrated cloud services from Google, Postini, and Salesforce.com, as well as a campus-wide Meraki 802.11n network. In implementing Meraki, Westmont became both one of the first universities to deploy 802.11n campus-wide, and to deploy a cloud-controlled wireless LAN.
We were thrilled when Westmont chose Meraki (especially after a thorough bakeoff) and we’re just as excited to see them recognized publicly for their vision and execution. And we’d be remiss not to congratulate Novacoast, an IT professional services firm and one of our close partners, who managed the installation.
If you’re curious about Westmont’s experience with Meraki, you can check out our Cloud Controller Tour that features Westmont’s network, and watch a short interview with their CIO, Reed Sheard. Read about Westmont and the other InfoWorld 100 winners here.
We put a lot of care into building solid, high-quality products. We think our APs should last a lifetime, and now we’re putting our money where our mouth is.
