Northern Air Cargo chooses the Meraki MX50 branch router for wired networking
SAN FRANCISCO — May 11, 2011 — Meraki, the cloud-based networking company, today announced that Northern Air Cargo (NAC) chose Meraki’s cloud-managed routers to provide its multi-service wide area networking (WAN). With headquarters in Anchorage, Alaska, NAC is Alaska’s largest scheduled all-cargo airline with over 30 locations in North America.
NAC provides scheduled flights between hubs, as well as service via a network of station agents to secondary villages beyond the hubs, allowing customers to get their freight to any destination throughout rural Alaska. NAC will deploy Meraki MX cloud-managed routers at its hubs in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Bethel, Dead Horse, and elsewhere, as well as with its station agents.
The Meraki MX50 routers provide Internet gateway services, a next-generation firewall, and application traffic shaping – with all locations centrally managed over the web.
“The MX provides an easier way to manage our networks remotely, and that’s a necessity because of the geographic layout of our network,” said Mike Cappa, NAC’s Senior Systems Administrator. “Alaska is so huge, and most of the sites we fly to have no roads to them. It’s quite an involved endeavor to get there. Meraki’s cloud managed dashboard gives us notifications about outages, as well as a lot more insight into our networks.”
Cappa explained that the plug-and-play aspect of the Meraki MX routers is similarly ideal for NAC’s highly distributed deployment. “Whoever is there can set it up,” he said. “Compared to other deployments we’ve had to do, this is much easier.”
NAC also uses Meraki access points to provide an open wireless network for employees. The Meraki wireless and wired networks are both managed through Meraki’s intuitive web-based dashboard.
“The Meraki MX product line was designed for organizations with distributed networks,” said Daghan Altas, Meraki Product Manager. “With some locations above the Arctic Circle, NAC is an ideal company to reap the benefits of managing both wired and wireless networks from the cloud.”
About Meraki
Meraki is the leader in cloud networking with over 17,000 networks deployed worldwide. Meraki’s cloud networking solutions combine rich enterprise features with intuitive web-based management that eliminates specialized training and certifications. Meraki is located in San Francisco, California and is funded in part by Sequoia Capital and Google. For more information, visit http://meraki.com/
