Here at Meraki, we like to take the traditional network experience (read: complex and expensive) and turn it on its head by making it easier to use and manage while keeping it affordable.  Recently, our engineers have been working on identity-based policy enforcement, a feature set that is typically found in only the most complex and expensive wireless LAN solutions.  Meraki’s new Identity Policy Manager (IPM) offers identity-based policy controls, such as per-user VLAN tagging and per-user access control lists, coupled with the easy-to-use graphical interface that our customers have come to know and love.  We see a lot of higher education organizations use this feature set to create different access policies for the various students, faculty, and guests that access the wireless network.  We also have seen larger businesses use these features to enforce granular access control over multiple sites.

With Meraki, these schools and businesses can implement these same access policies without having to pay dearly for them.  And, if you’re used to having to read bulky administrator manuals to configure features like these, we’re sorry to report that you may have to find some new bedtime reading material: A Meraki wireless network is so easy to configure that you won’t have to read a single configuration guide.  (Feel free to contact us for some good book recommendations.)

Please see our press release about our new IPM product. As you’ll see, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is currently using IPM successfully today.  Others can look for it in a few weeks when it becomes generally available, at no additional cost to Enterprise customers.

- Posted by Jed Lau

Starting in 2003, I led the RoofNet project with Sanjit Biswas, Dan Aguayo and Prof. Robert Morris at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, MA.  We spent a huge amount of our time in the lab building prototypes, deploying networks ourselves, and working on technology to make wireless more reliable, accessible, and simpler. This work and technology served as the catalyst for Meraki’s formation, and 7 years later we’re proud to have the technology and product deployed across tens of thousands of networks and be the backbone of a company with incredible momentum.

Because CSAIL is the birthplace of Meraki and MIT is the alma mater of myself and Meraki’s two other co-founders, we have always felt a special connection to the university.

The future of networking is in wireless – it’s a requirement in the workplace and something everyone needs to be effective. Given this fact, and our strong ties to the MIT community, you can imagine our excitement in sharing that today, MIT’s CSAIL is now officially a customer of Meraki.  CSAIL made the decision to switch from its primary networking vendor, a well-known provider, because of a growing number of complaints about reliability, performance and manageability. MIT will deploy 80 Meraki MR14 access points to improve reliability and performance throughout the building for more than 800 faculty, staff, and students.

We are incredibly pleased to have partnered with MIT and CSAIL on this project, and look forward to supporting their initiatives with Meraki.

- Posted by John Bicket

We’re happy to share that we’ve launched the Meraki Network Simulator: a free demo version of the Meraki Enterprise Cloud Controller that allows you to try out all of our web-based tools without purchasing or setting up physical access points.  For a long time, we’ve wanted to enable potential customers to test out the Meraki Dashboard without physical hardware.  The Meraki Cloud Controller is the most unique piece of our wireless LAN offering, providing simple centralized management to network administrators any time and any place over the web.  You really have to experience it personally to understand why it’s such a revolutionary way to manage your network.

The Meraki Network Simulator contains several sample networks that allow you to see how Meraki could work for you.  We’ve even populated the Cloud Controller with real-life data that we’ve captured and anonymized, so you can get a realistic picture of how the Meraki Dashboard looks on a live network.  Here’s a taste of what you can do with the simulator:

• Test-drive the Meraki Enterprise Cloud Controller for free, without purchasing hardware
• Experience the complete Cloud Controller configuration UI

• Test-drive Meraki’s network monitoring features

• Try out sample networks for office, university, and conference use cases

• Create your own blank network simulation and set it up from scratch, configuring simulated access points

Try it out and let us know what you think!

- Marie Williams

Our engineers are pretty busy and pretty humble, so a lot of what they do flies below the radar.
I’ve worked closely with rockstar engineers from Google, Apple, and the like, but the way our folks
operate blows my mind.

As those of you who use our product know, we have a “Make a Wish” widget at the bottom of every page in our app.
This lets users provide product feedback quickly and easily, which goes straight to our engineering and PM teams.

Below is a recent message received through Make a Wish, and the response from engineering. Take a close look at the timestamps.

A lot of the improvements our engineers make to the product happen without press releases, parties, and fanfare, so I wanted to shed some light on the kind of improvements that happen every day. Exchanges like this also reveal how helpful our customers are. The product wouldn’t be what it is without their feedback.

Lastly, it would be impossible to move this quickly while maintaining the reliability that our enterprise customers
expect without the big investment that our engineers have made in robust automated testing systems. This takes a lot of time and dicipline. While this work goes unseen outside of Meraki, the constant stream of new features and improvements, year after year, would be impossible without it.

Hats off!

Last week we upgraded all Standard networks to Pro at no charge. We thought we could provide the best service to our Standard customers by consolidating Standard and Pro to offer the same feature set.

This upgrade means Standard network operators will have the exact same features as Pro, including billing features, captive portal control, and our recently expanded Pro features such as splash pages and encryption on both SSIDs.

We hope everyone enjoys the new features!

I’m happy to announce that PC Magazine has presented us with the coveted Editor’s Choice award for our enterprise wireless LAN solution!  Arriving on the heels of a 4-out-of-5-stars review, which you can read here, the Editor’s Choice award is bestowed upon only the top 17% of products reviewed by PC Magazine.

We are humbled by the glowing review and award.   By receiving them, we further dedicate ourselves to our mission to provide an affordable yet feature-rich wireless LAN solution that is easy to deploy and manage.  It is this benefit that delights our customers and that is clearly resonating in the market.

- Posted by Jed Lau

Over the past two weeks, all of us at Meraki have been following the news about the earthquake in Haiti and trying to find ways to help. It’s hard to imagine what daily life is like for the millions who were affected, but we hope the international community’s aid efforts will help re-build the country as quickly as possible.

As a company, we wanted to do our part to contribute to the relief efforts. Last week, we sent a shipment of outdoor and solar APs to Partners in Health who have set up ten satellite connected clinics throughout Haiti. We hope these APs will help connect the thousands of doctors and relief workers in the months ahead.

If you’re not already familiar with PIH (www.pih.org) from Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains beyond Mountains, it’s worth checking out the website at pih.org to see all the work they’ve done in Haiti over the past 20 years. I was first introduced to the organization by one of their active volunteers, Paul English (the co-founder of Kayak.com) who I met at the World Economic Forum in 2008.  I have since come to admire PIH and its founder Dr. Paul Farmer deeply – their relentless drive to improve the health of Haitians is nothing short of inspiring.

Partners in Health is doing courageous work, and if you’re looking for a way to help Haiti, please consider making a donation to their cause. I’m confident it’ll be put to good use.

- Posted by Sanjit Biswas

We’re excited to kick off the new year with a new webinar series. Over the next eight weeks, we will be discussing a variety of wireless topics – from enabling guest access to debugging client connectivity issues and more. We are particularly looking forward to giving each attendee a FREE Meraki Indoor access point with a 3-year Enterprise Cloud Controller license (a $450 value!).

We’ll have sessions every two weeks, covering the following subjects:

Deploying Guest Wireless Access

Multi-site Wireless Management and Remote Help Desk

Wireless Authentication

Upgrading to 802.11n

Our first session – on deploying guest wireless access – kicks off next Wednesday, January 13. Guests increasingly expect wireless Internet access when they visit your organization, be it an office, campus or other facility. Learn how to get set up painlessly and inexpensively, as we discuss the requirements and options for guest wireless systems, including tips for deployment with minimal expense and complexity.

Sign up for next Wednesday’s webinar here (Update: if you want to sign up for upcoming webinars, go here), and check out the complete schedule below:

Deploying Guest Wireless Access
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010
11:00-11:45 am (Pacific Time)

Multi-Site Wireless Management & Remote Help Desk
Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010
11:00-11:45 am (Pacific Time)

Wireless Authentication
Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2010
11:00-11:45 am (Pacific Time)

Upgrading to 802.11n
Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010
11:00-11:45 am (Pacific Time)

-Posted by Marie Williams

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 16 SSIDs

We’ve upped the maximum number of SSIDs from 4 to 16.  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 16 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!

-Posted by Kiren Sekar

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:

- Posted by Amy Zhou

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.

-Posted by Jed Lau

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:

That Wifi was Flawless! Thanks goes out to the team at BT (especially Gary Shainberg who worked with Meraki to make the mesh impeccable), whose mesh network was so solid that there wasn’t a single blip the entire conference and we used only 10% of the bandwidth. As Loic points out: ” there was a 1gb line financed and paid for by LeWeb that’s why we never exceeded 10-20% of the bandwidth available”. Impressive! In fact, I could have gotten on Bit Torrent and gone crazy without causing any ruckus. Fabulous job!

Again, nice work by Gary at BT, and Rob and Mukesh from Meraki, for making this a success.

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 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 Meraki participated in the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado.  EDUCAUSE is a non-profit organization whose mission is to advance the intelligent use of technology in higher education.  This was the first time that Meraki has participated in an EDUCAUSE event, but it will certainly not be the last!  We have never seen such a concentration of tech-savvy, higher ed IT thought leaders (more than 4000 of them) in one place before, and it was exciting to be a part of it.  Each day was packed with seminars where schools could share best practices and their experiences with various IT initiatives with their colleagues, as well as keynote talks on the latest trends and issues in higher ed IT and technology plus workshops from over 250 vendors doing demos of some very cool products on the trade show floor.

Meraki hosted a booth on the floor as well as a special dinner event for CIOs and Directors of Technology for a small group of colleges and universities.  We had the opportunity to chat with folks from schools with as little as 100 students all the way up to big state schools with over 25,000 students, and to learn about their needs and pain points.  We saw tremendous interest at the booth in Dashboard demos of some of the networks of our current higher ed customers, such as Westmont College in Santa Barbara and Sweetbriar College in Virginia.  Both schools have recently done campus-wide 802.11n deployments with Meraki, and their respective techology gurus spoke at our EDUCAUSE event about their experiences.

Major takeaways from the event:

-With the degree of budget-cutting that higher ed has seen over the last 12 months, schools are more than ever looking for ways to increase their bang-for-buck on IT spending and for ways to make reduced staff more efficient and more productive.
- There is a tremendous amount of excitement surrounding new ways to leverage cloud computing to reduce capex and operating costs of IT departments while increasing reliability and manageability of systems.
- Meraki is a great fit for higher ed, organizations that even in the best of times make due with limited budgets and IT staff that need a fully-featured wireless LAN that won’t break the bank, can be managed by a small staff and can easily scale and be rolled out across entire campuses.

We are excited to help our new friends from EDUCAUSE find ways to save money while simultaneously improving the quality of services that they can provide their students, turning their wireless networks from a liability into a strategic asset for recruiting and student retention.

Look for Meraki at future EDUCAUSE events, especially in places where the weather is as gorgeous as it was in Denver last week!

Mort and Hans giving Dashboard demos and chatting with booth visitors

-Posted by Greg Williams

Deploying the industry’s first cloud-based enterprise wireless LAN provides our customers with many unique and powerful benefits that can make IT administrators’ jobs easier.  One particularly powerful and useful tool is the ability for Meraki support staff to help remotely troubleshoot and resolve any technical issues that arise when deploying and integrating Meraki wireless networks with existing wired networks.  Leveraging the secure tunnel that is created between end devices and the Meraki Cloud Controller, Meraki can upon request assist you with basic diagnostics like checking if your firewall needs some tweaking for proper communication with your Meraki Cloud Controller.   In addition to the basics, Meraki can also conduct an in depth traffic analysis to determine what type of communication is flowing through your wired uplink as well as your wireless client connections.  This monitoring is captured in .pcap form for simple integration with popular network analysis tools such as Wireshark.  Since all of this testing can be conducted at the Meraki HQ, it allows Meraki’s Support Organization and its partners to act as natural extensions of your own networking team.  So if you’re struggling with a wireless issue and are still perplexed after searching the knowledge base, reach out to Meraki Support via Dashboard, our website or phone and save valuable time by leveraging these additional tools at your disposal.

-Posted by Dan Pittelkow