I haven’t had to much time to write about this, but i wanted to let everyone know about the decision we made here at Epic Management to go with Meraki for our enterprise wireless network. This project had the following goals:
- Reliable high performance wireless to Epic Management users (~1500)
- Centralized management and reporting
- Enhanced security and control of who can access the network
- Ease of administration
- highly available management with no single point of failure.
The existing wireless implementation consisted of Cisco Wireless AP’s with no controller and ACS being used to control the configurations. This let to several support issues and that coupled with the lack of wireless N support let us to look at other solutions. We reached out to several vendors for proposals and even had an audit from a highly competent wireless engineer from Connect 802 (http://www.connect802.com/wifi_site_survey.htm). After providing a detailed analysis of our current wireless network, he proposed we look into either Ruckus or Cisco to meet our wireless needs. I reached out to my colleagues and Meraki came up during conversation. I spend some time looking into the company and was intrigued by what i saw. The promise of a highly manageable wireless network with ease of administration and high performance and security seemed to be a good fit. We proceeded to further look into Ruckus and Cisco, and we spent some time with Meraki looking into how this might be a good fit for our organization. Long story short, we met all of our objectives, came in under budget and deployed more access points to more locations than we would have otherwise done. A slam dunk for epic management. One of my favorite configurations we decided on implementing was 802.1x authentication which enabled us to control who was able to access our WLAN using active directory.
Would i recommend Meraki to large organizations looking to deploy or upgrade wireless? Absolutely. Would i also recommend this solution to Small Business? Absolutely. It is truely a turn key wireless solution that currently has no match.
To read the press release about our implementation you can follow the link below.