Last month we announced our new Traffic Shaper feature and gave administrators unprecedented visibility into the wireless traffic on their network, providing the ability to see what might be bogging down their network, be it YouTube, BitTorrent or too many users uploading pictures to Facebook. Now, with the new Traffic Shaper page in Dashboard, administrators finally have the tools to not only see what kinds of recreational applications are taking over their network but to do something about it!
Administrators can now create application-specific shaping policies for total control over their wireless bandwidth. Let’s say your Sales team needs snappy access to Salesforce.com at all times, but most of Engineering is streaming World Series games and consuming all of your bandwidth. With Traffic Shaper, shaping policies can be created that apply per user bandwidth limits for specific applications such as video streaming sites, as well as apply QoS priority levels at both Layer 2 and 3 to make sure your Salesforce traffic gets prioritized across the network.
To make setting up new shaping policies fast and simple, we have created pre-defined groups of applications that administrators most commonly want to shape:
Administrators can also create more specific policies for particular applications using HTTP hostnames (eg. salesforce.com), IP and port numbers. Here is an example of a typical shaping policy that you would see in an office setting:
In this example, a rule has been created to apply a 1 Mbps bandwidth limit to all users on the Meraki-Corp SSID for Peer-to-Peer and streaming video and music applications. A second rule has also been created to provide Layer 3 QoS prioritization to applications that are critical to this business, Salesforce.com and Dropbox.com, as well as to provide unlimited bandwidth to these applications.
Since Traffic Shaper can leverage the intelligence of over 16,000 customer networks through the Meraki Cloud Controller, Traffic Shaper’s database of application signatures is always updated. As new P2P and social media applications appear on the scene, they will be quickly fingerprinted and added to the Cloud Controller database for our customer networks so that administrators are never caught unaware by the next BitTorrent.
Traffic Shaper can now be found under the Configure tab in Dashboard. If you are interested in learning more about how Traffic Shaper works, we invite you to join us for a webinar that we’ll be conducting about Traffic Shaper on November 2nd. Details can be found here:
Since releasing enhanced voice and video capabilities earlier this year, we have seen growth in the number of video and voice applications running over Meraki wireless networks. Physical security and voice/data convergence have been implemented broadly over wired networks in the last decade, but providing these applications over wireless networks is a more recent trend. Our customers have been able to deploy these applications easily and reliably by utilizing a number of features in the Meraki solution:
1. WMM and Power Save capabilities enable wireless devices to obtain quality of service (QoS) and conserve battery power, respectively, when associated to a Meraki wireless network. With these features, wireless surveillance cameras and VOIP handsets can stream audio and video content with the best performance available, and at the same time, spend less time docked in battery chargers.
2. Offline mode allows multimedia devices to continue operating in the LAN, even if connectivity to the Meraki Cloud Controller is not available. Surveillance cameras can still stream to monitoring stations on the LAN, and mobile handsets can continue to place or receive calls, regardless of network changes outside the LAN.
3. Bridge mode provides seamless connectivity between wireless and wired devices. With this feature, surveillance cameras, DVRs, VOIP phones, monitoring stations, and any other networked devices that send or receive multimedia data can discover and connect to each other without any network barriers.
4. VLAN tagging helps ensure that wireless multimedia traffic gets QoS prioritization over the wired network. Wireless surveillance cameras and VOIP handsets can associate to Meraki over a dedicated SSID, whose traffic can be VLAN-tagged to get VIP treatment by the upstream switches and routers.
5. Meraki’s mesh networking technology just works, without any additional configuration. Meraki access points communicate with neighboring Meraki access points to provide wireless coverage in areas where Ethernet ports are not available. In this way, an administrator can deploy a video monitoring environment or a wireless VOIP network quickly and easily.
All of these features work in concert to provide a superior multimedia experience over the Meraki wireless network. As an illustration of this capability, below is a screenshot that one customer sent us, depicting 15 wireless surveillance cameras streaming video across a Meraki network to a DVR on the LAN.
We are excited about this convergence in voice, video, and data over the wireless LAN, and we will continue to invest in features that make this convergence easier and more reliable for enterprise customers.
Since releasing enhanced voice and video capabilities earlier this year, we have seen growth in the number of video and voice applications running over Meraki wireless networks. Physical security and voice/data convergence have been implemented broadly over wired networks in the last decade, but providing these applications over wireless networks is a more recent trend. Our customers have been able to deploy these applications easily and reliably by utilizing a number of features in the Meraki solution:
1. WMM and Power Save capabilities enable wireless devices to obtain quality of service (QoS) and conserve battery power, respectively, when associated to a Meraki wireless network. With these features, wireless surveillance cameras and VOIP handsets can stream audio and video content with the best performance available, and at the same time, spend less time docked in battery chargers.
2. Offline mode allows multimedia devices to continue operating in the LAN, even if connectivity to the Meraki Cloud Controller is not available. Surveillance cameras can still stream to monitoring stations on the LAN, and mobile handsets can continue to place or receive calls, regardless of network changes outside the LAN.
3. Bridge mode provides seamless connectivity between wireless and wired devices. With this feature, surveillance cameras, DVRs, VOIP phones, monitoring stations, and any other networked devices that send or receive multimedia data can discover and connect to each other without any network barriers.
4. VLAN tagging helps ensure that wireless multimedia traffic gets QoS prioritization over the wired network. Wireless surveillance cameras and VOIP handsets can associate to Meraki over a dedicated SSID, whose traffic can be VLAN-tagged to get VIP treatment by the upstream switches and routers.
5. Meraki’s mesh networking technology just works, without any additional configuration. Meraki access points communicate with neighboring Meraki access points to provide wireless coverage in areas where Ethernet ports are not available. In this way, an administrator can deploy a video monitoring environment or a wireless VOIP network quickly and easily.
All of these features work in concert to provide a superior multimedia experience over the Meraki wireless network. As an illustration of this capability, below is a screenshot that one customer sent us, depicting 15 wireless surveillance cameras streaming video across a Meraki network to a DVR on the LAN.
We are excited about this convergence in voice, video, and data over the wireless LAN, and we will continue to invest in features that make this convergence easier and more reliable for enterprise customers.
