Top Tier College Chooses Meraki to Deploy Campus-Wide WLAN for 50% the Cost and Complexity of Traditional Wireless Solutions

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — September 15, 2009 – Meraki, the cloud-based wireless networking company, has been selected by Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia, for its campus-wide, indoor/outdoor 802.11n network. After careful consideration and testing, Sweet Briar College (Sweet Briar) chose Meraki over traditional Enterprise WLAN providers including Cisco Systems. Sweet Briar joins a growing number of colleges choosing Meraki for its high performance networks that are easy to manage and typically cost 50% less than traditional wireless solutions.

Founded in 1901 Sweet Briar is a nationally ranked college with approximately 1,000 students, staff and visitors on campus every day. The 3,250 acre campus with its mix of new and hard-to-wire historic buildings presented a special challenge to the network services team. Over the years, a mix of WiFi networks emerged on campus, but they proved unreliable and difficult to manage.

Sweet Briar decided to upgrade to an all 802.11n network for two main reasons. First, there was significant demand for better wireless Internet access from students, faculty and administration. “Existing and prospective Sweet Briar students considered high performance WiFi an essential part of the college experience,” said Aaron Mahler, director of network services. Second, Sweet Briar needed to consolidate its existing hodgepodge of WiFi networks to improve reliability, performance, security, and user satisfaction.

Sweet Briar’s requirements for a WLAN system included superior centralized management, high performance access points and a total system cost that could fit within a tight budget. In addition, Sweet Briar decided to upgrade its wired network at the same time, so the wireless system needed to work extremely well with the new wired network.

After evaluating several WLAN systems including those from companies that were considered for the wired network infrastructure such as Cisco, Sweet Briar chose Meraki to provide its 802.11n wireless network in academic areas, residential halls, common areas and the school’s hotel and conference center facilities.

“Meraki has been a perfect fit for Sweet Briar,” continued Aaron Mahler. “The web-based management system and plug and play architecture allowed us to roll out the Meraki system extremely quickly with our existing staff … the simplest install of any system I have ever seen. In addition, with Meraki’s compelling pricing we were able to increase coverage by 50% versus our other alternatives while using 802.11n access points. Without Meraki it would have been cost prohibitive to upgrade to 802.11n while building a campus wide network.”

Meraki offers universities and colleges reliable, premium-featured networks that can be deployed for less than half the cost and in less than half the time of traditional solutions. Meraki’s Cloud Controller offers very easy-to-use and powerful management tools that allow a multi-site network to be managed remotely with minimal IT staff and resource time. Meraki’s high performance 802.11n access points and mesh configuration provide strong indoor and outdoor coverage across entire campuses including classrooms, auditoriums, stadiums, student and faculty housing and common areas on the campus grounds.

Meraki also offers educational institutions the latest enterprise-grade wireless LAN features, such as automatic radio frequency (RF) planning, quality-of-service (QoS) for voice and video, security with 802.1x authentication and the ability to create multiple virtual-LANs on a single physical network – for example one for students, another for staff, others for different wireless applications such as security cameras or voice over wireless.

“With Meraki’s Enterprise Cloud Controller not only can we manage the network easily and remotely, we can scale the network without having to incur costs for additional on-site controllers,” said Aaron Mahler director of network services. “As students and staff have been using the network, we have had many requests to extend the network for outdoor applications including science programs conducted in remote areas of our campus. With Meraki’s scalability, I know it will be easy to extend the network to make Sweet Briar an even better place to learn and work.”

Blue Ridge Internetworks, a network solutions provider and a leading Meraki partner, consulted with Sweet Briar College on the upgrade of its wired and wireless network. “Meraki’s cloud-based WLAN systems are ideal for colleges looking to upgrade to 802.11n quickly, easily, with their existing IT staff, and under a tight budget,” said Baylor Fooks, cofounder of Blue Ridge Internetworks. “If your college or university is considering a traditional WLAN system from Cisco or Aruba, you owe it to yourself to evaluate Meraki.”

About Meraki

Meraki offers enterprise-class wireless networks at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional networking vendors. This is made possible by its unique cloud-based technology. The company’s customers range from small and medium-sized businesses to global hotel chains to world-class educational institutions. Meraki wireless networks serve millions of users on over 10,000 networks in more than 130 countries. Meraki is located in San Francisco, California, and is funded in part by Sequoia Capital and Google. For more information, go to www.meraki.com. For information on becoming a Meraki certified reseller, go to www.meraki.com/partners.

About Blue Ridge Internetworks
Blue Ridge Internetworks is a network solution provider and wireless internet company that serves small to medium enterprises, healthcare, education, government, and multitenant industries. Blue Ridge provides a full range of IT services for its clients including network engineering, network support, technical assessment, project management, internet access, hosting, and remote back up services. Based in Charlottesville, VA, Blue Ridge Internetworks delivers services nationally. For more information, visit www.briworks.com

About Sweet Briar College
Sweet Briar, a nationally ranked college located in Virginia, offers more than 40 programs of study. Students create and learn with an exceptional faculty, almost all of whom hold the doctorate or the appropriate terminal degree. A 9 to 1 student/faculty ratio ensures that classes are small and each student’s educational program is personalized. For more information, visit www.sbc.edu

Katherine Madariaga

Atomic Public Relations

415-402-0230

katherine@atomicpr.com

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