Meraki Technology

Hybrid Cloud Architecture

Meraki’s industry leading system architecture combines the management and scalability benefits of cloud-hosted services, while maintaining the high performance and reliability of local hardware. The Meraki architecture consists of three key components:

Summary

• Performance of local hardware without the complexity of on-site hardware controller
• Powerful feature set and services in the cloud
• Constantly up-to-date with latest features and tools
• Backed by multiple datacenters worldwide

Innovative Hybrid Architecture

MerakiOS combined with Meraki’s family of high-performance access points. The MerakiOS handles routing decisions, policy enforcement and over-the-air system upgrades while forwarding local network traffic at wire speed. The hardware and firmware are also custom-built to provide hooks to the Meraki Cloud Controller™ for everything from wireless security policies, RF channel planning / power management and even display LEDs.
Meraki Control Tunnel, the SSL-encrypted secure management and statistics tunnel that connects local networks to Meraki’s datacenters. The Meraki Control Tunnel establishes a reliable, encrypted and robust IP-over-UDP tunnel to multiple Meraki’s datacenters worldwide, where it receives configuration information, exchanges network statistics and gains access to hosted network services such as authentication. The Control Tunnel is designed to operate safely through multiple layers of firewalls and network address translation, and will automatically recover from connection failures or network topology changes.
Meraki Cloud Controller™, the set of cloud-hosted services running in the service cloud providing centralized management, recording historical statistics and running other network services such as user authentication and system alerts. By assigning multiple backend management, monitoring and database servers to each network, Meraki’s platform is able to deliver power and scalability at levels previously unprecedented in hardware network controllers.

Redundancy and Scale

Meraki’s hybrid architecture is able to provide local network reliability with the scalability of a cloud-hosted service. In case of local Internet connectivity issues, each network operates autonomously until connectivity is restored. Meraki’s multiple worldwide datacenters also provide continuous backups of all statistics and configuration in geographically distinct locations.

With millions of clients devices served from over ten thousand networks worldwide, the Meraki system is also designed to scale seamlessly with the needs of any deployment. Some of the largest wireless networks worldwide rely on Meraki’s cloud services to provide management and historical statistics across hundreds of thousands of devices within a single network.

Benefits of a Multi-Tenant System

As with other large hosted systems such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps, Meraki’s systems operate under a multi-tenant model. Every network deployed worldwide enjoys the benefits of large database systems, automated monitoring and a fault-tolerant architecture as well as automatic and ongoing system upgrades. Also, as an online system with automated error reporting, device compatibilities issues are caught instantly and fixed, without having to wait for users to notice and call for technical support.