The D4 Business Village Luzern is the largest business centre in central Switzerland, priding itself in offering the best possible work conditions to innovative, fast-growing companies. Its modern architecture, great infrastructure, and comprehensive services make it an optimal place for businesses to develop and thrive. In September 2003, the Business Village launched with just 22,500 m2  of space and tenants employing 100 people, and it has now grown to over 53,000m2 with about 2,000 employees in over 100 companies. Manager of Finance Adrian lmiger knew the Business Village needed a highly secure and easily scalable networking solution to keep up with the growth.

Original networking challenges

·  Equipment used in the past was outdated and no longer met the scalability and reliability requirements of the growing Business Village. The performance of the networks was declining fast, with throughput slowing as the number of users grew.

·  The previous solution was complex: granting users access was a long process that required paper tickets to be distributed to each user.

·  The growth in devices and users made it clear that the previous solution had become outdated: the business centre now caters for business laptops and devices as well as personal smartphones and tablets.

Why Cisco Meraki

·  The Cisco Meraki cloud-managed networking solution is innovative and flexible, aligning to the Business Village’s brand image.

·   The cloud-based approach makes it simple to configure and monitor networks in only a few clicks, allowing the Business Village to better cater to customers’ needs.

·  The easy configuration of up to 15 SSIDs per network is essential to creating customised rules for various user groups.

·   Being able to personalise the splash page to align it with the Business Village’s branding made the balance tip for Cisco Meraki.

Deployment

·  The deployment was remarkably simple in comparison with traditional solutions, and fully completed in just three months.

·  Indoor and outdoor 802.11ac access points and virtually stackable switches were installed throughout the Village to ensure high quality coverage for all users.

·  Three SSIDs were configured with all traffic funneled to an on-site server: one for guests in indoor and outdoor public areas, one for users in the conference and events spaces, and one for the business network.

·  With a few mouse clicks in the Meraki dashboard, administrators set up a traffic shaping rule to throttle down the guest SSID: this prevented guest users from stalling bandwidth, giving priority to business customers.

Results

·  Guests can now easily log into the network through a Meraki-hosted splash page that is designed according to the Business Village’s branding guidelines, and advertises their newest site.

·  The location heatmap makes it simple to identify which areas of the Business Village are busiest throughout the day. For example the guest WiFi is heavily used in the restaurants and outdoor areas at lunchtime, so the team was able to balance the traffic accordingly.

·  Meraki switches make it possible to see each switch port in dashboard as if they were physically stacked, allowing the Business Village administrators to be flexible with per-port configurations such as enabling PoE or scheduling ports.

·  User behaviours can be monitored with real-time monitoring features , making it easier to adapt the network according to device usage or user groups, and to create group policies or traffic-shaping rules.

·  The Business Village is now able to offer a reliable service 24/7 to its customers, thanks to the stability of the Meraki solution.

A very simple login process and a splash page with our corporate design were key for us. Additionally, we needed a solution which is highly secure and provides great performance for all users regardless if there
are indoor or outdoor. Meraki meets all our requirements and was therefore chosen.Adrian Elmiger, Finance Manager for D4 Business Village