Disclaimer: I spent the day at Meraki today (mostly under NDA) and left
more impressed than when I arrived (and I've been a Meraki fan for a
while now as you probably know). No, I don't get any kickbacks from
Meraki, though they do give me gear to test and my current work network
is using that (replacing a mix of Cisco 1200 APs and a pfsense WRAP box
for guest wireless). What follows are notes about what I saw and some
conclusions.
Behind the scenes at Meraki a LOT of stuff is happening to make
everything they do seem so simple. The engineering team ran some numbers
by us. Suffice to say, they have an impressive (and non-trivial) logging
infrastructure. Meraki are obsessed with monitoring and numbers, and
they use them to keep their clients' networks running very reliably.
For example, firmware updates are rolled out very carefully (though the
website dashboard is often updated 2-3 times/day). Some networks (like
socalfreenet) have agreed to be early adopters and get firmware updates
first. The results are monitored and compared with historical data (e.g.
are there more AP reboots - they have a hardware watchdog - and why?.
Are customers having problems?) In one instance they found that 0.5% of
DNS servers were misconfigured in a way that mattered to the new
firmware. They were able to rollback firmware for just those customers
affected (including those that hadn't noticed yet), fix it, test it, and
continue with the rollout. Another problem they found was misconfigured
MTU on a specific home broadband provider and were able to recognise and
adapt accordingly.
Put together, these are the intangibles that keep a wireless network
running 24x7. Collectively Meraki customers provide a huge base of
client devices (socalfreenet provided many of those!!), and so they see
problems and fix them for everyone. Their company culture is all about
this. As our scfn experience confirms, Meraki are not reticent to invest
the time to fix things that only (seem to) affect a small number of people.
The whole dashboard / Cloud Controller is constantly evolving. E.g. I
see the latest dashboard now includes this info for one of my office users:
Manufacturer: Apple
OS fingerprint: Mac OS X
Connection: wired, wireless
Capabilities: 802.11n, 2.4 and 5 GHz
The OS fingerprint is brand new. Its a classic example of why software
as a service is so cool. Sidenote: today there were 13 iPhones in
Golden Hill today, 1 Blackberry, 15 Vista, 66 Win XP, and 55 OSX computers.
I also heard from another customer and saw his photos of an amazing
install today at a 40 acre steel fabrication plant - iron *everywhere* -
that had defeated all other much more expensive gear but Meraki was
meshing nicely using these fancy
http://meraki.com/products_services/access_points/MR58/ APs as anchors.
Another involved petroleum trucks dumping daily delivery data -- it
reminded me of a presentation Jon gave a couple of years ago about
onboard video capture dumps.
Although its not advertised, Meraki will let you 'upgrade' their
non-enterprise radios to full enterprise capabilities - i.e. the
802.11b/g indoor ($150) and outdoor ($200) units. The dashboard (I mean
"cloud controller") costs $150/radio/year (or $300/3 yrs).
This seems like a real bargain to me in a work setting! Two years ago I
would have shuddered at $150/yr/ap pricing, but now that I'm the person
who gets asked to keep the wireless working (made the mistake of
mentioning I knew a little about it) I think about this differently. I
think of it in terms of my time, or the hourly rate of someone I'd have
to bring onsite to configure, troubleshoot or tweak anything. At that
price, its a bargain. I'd have to spend $100 just to pay someone to
configure a radio. For $150, I not only get 'plug it in' config, but
also ongoing monitoring, traffic graphs, usage, network monitoring, and
automatic firmware updates with no downtime while its updating.
I could go on (tell me if you want more info about anything in
particular), but I encourage all of us wireless geeks to think about
Meraki Enterprise for work environments. I say this not because I'll get
kickbacks (apart from the gear they gave me to test), but because I
enjoy finding an engineering product that lives up to its hype and want
to help it triumph over the mediocrity that is all too common!
I'm also suggesting this because I'm confident that anyone using it in a
work environment that really needs wireless to work will find it both a
better and more cost effective solution than alternatives. Its
especially appealing for environments with little or no technical
support. However, even those with geeks on staff will enjoy the fast
deployment, stability and monitoring. (E.g., I can do multiple SSIDs on
a Cisco AP, but its a lot quicker to configure on Meraki, not to mention
the builtin captive portal!).
Last but not least, I learned that Meraki offer a 30 day free trial of
their Enterprise gear. See http://meraki.com/campaigns/freetrial/. As
far as I could tell, based on talking to other customers there today,
this is not a marketing gimmick to stick you with gear that you can't
return but a genuine belief that the gear sells itself once people see
how easy it is to set up and how well it works.
Phew, sorry for such a long mail! Hope it was useful and wasn't just
seen as a plug for Meraki.
cheers, michael
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