Saracen Mineral Holdings

Overview

With 5 mining sites, 200 employees, and 750 contractors, Saracen Mineral Holdings is a growing gold mining company based in Australia. With two larger projects in WA, Carosue Dam, and Thunderbox mine, Saracen strives to create operational excellence to keep the mines running efficiently and to continue its potential for further growth through exploration. At 4 of the 5 mine sites, Saracen provides housing to its gold mining contractors and the networks are supported by Meraki MR wireless access points, MS Switches, and MX Security Appliances. Tim Irimies, the IT Manager, and his IT engineer rely on the Meraki solution to create optimal digital experiences for the gold miners in their dwelling spaces.

Original networking challenges

• Five mining sites across Australia, 4 of which have dwelling villages for mine contractors. After each day of mining, contractors expect to have reliable Internet access to watch movies and videos, listen to music, and check email and social media.
• IT manager and IT engineer located in Perth, but they needed a solution that they could easily deploy and manage remotely. Prior to Meraki, the team needed to physically connect to a device to troubleshoot it, creating increased cost and decreased efficiency.

Why Cisco Meraki

• 2-person IT team needed a solution that was easy to deploy and manage, as time needed to be allocated to maintaining the business network, along with other projects.
• Configuring network alerts in the Meraki dashboard allows IT to know when a certain network or device event occurs. IT can then sign into the dashboard and troubleshoot right away.
• Dashboard visibility allows team to see what is happening with network devices, client devices, and connections in real-time.

The Deployment

• Team deployed 50 MR wireless APs, 10 MS Switches, and 6 MX Security Appliances to 3 housing areas at the mine sites.
• Deployment at first village was configured by a contractor; however, all remaining Meraki deployments were completed by Irimies and his team member.
• Two SSIDs created to assign different security policies to staff and to guests.
• Created content filtering and traffic shaping rules (per-client bandwidth limits) for the two SSIDs.

Results since deployment

• Can use location analytics to see that most clients are connected for 6+ hours and return daily. Dashboard allows team to troubleshoot remotely by using the live tools including cable tests on switches.
• Plan to deploy Meraki APs to future mines with housing areas as organisation continues to grow.

Whenever we have complaints, we can check what’s happening in the Meraki dashboard and resolve the problem or go back to the original complaint and get it sorted right away.

Tim Irimies

IT Manager