Meraki Positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant of the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Wireless LAN Infrastructure

Recognized for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute
SAN FRANCISCO – March 9, 2011 – Meraki, the cloud networking company, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner Inc. in the Visionaries quadrant of the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Wireless LAN Infrastructure.
According to Gartner, vendors placed in the Visionaries quadrant provide a differentiated approach to the wireless LAN market:

A vendor in the Visionaries quadrant demonstrates an ability to increase features in its offering to provide a unique and differentiated approach to the market. A visionary will have contributed innovations in one or more of the key areas of WLAN technologies (e.g., convergence, security, management or operational efficiency).
Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Wireless LAN Infrastructure (Global), 2011″ Michael King and Timothy Zimmerman, March 3, 2011.

Indeed, in the past year Meraki has achieved an unprecedented number of "Industry First" innovations:

• Traffic Shaper, cloud-based layer 7 application traffic shaping
• Networking as a Service, pay-as-you-go pricing for wireless LAN
• Meraki NAC, built-in wireless network access control
• Teleworker VPN, wired and wireless remote access from any Meraki access point
• Meraki MR24, the first enterprise-class 3 stream, 900 Mbit/s wireless access point
• Location Services, built-in tracking of WiFi clients without additional hardware

Gartner also highlights the importance of integrated wired and wireless networks. To that end, Meraki recently introduced the MX Series Cloud Managed Routers, offering next generation security and routing for wired clients. When deployed together, Meraki's wireless LAN and MX routers provide a "single pane of glass" for wireless and wired networks, seamlessly managed from the cloud.
"iPads, video, and web applications are forcing IT administrators to re-think their network," says Kiren Sekar, Director of Marketing at Meraki. "We believe Gartner's positioning of Meraki as a Visionary highlights the importance of the innovative features and services we have brought to market, providing enterprises the capacity and mobility for modern, open networks."

Fwd: Expand's WAN Optimization enables Server Consolidation success at Thompsons Solicitors

Expand Networks has added a new press release to its main website. Title: EXPAND NETWORKS ACCELERATES SERVER CONSOLIDATION SUCCESS AT THOMPSONS SOLICITORS Expand Networks, the leader in WAN optimization for branch office consolidation and virtualization, today announced that its advanced WAN Optimization has enabled a company-wide server consolidation project at Thompsons Solicitors, the most experienced personal injury practice in the UK. Expand's Accelerators are enhancing application and data performance for Thompsons' 1000-strong workforce, distributed in its branch offices nationwide, assuring their user experience and protecting  all branch office services from congestion, latency and delay. Date: 03/17/2011 08:00:00 AM To view the press release, please click here

How Many iPads Are On Your Wireless Network?

Do you know what impact iPads are having on your wireless network? Meraki’s Client Fingerprinting automatically recognizes and categorizes Apple iPads. Network administrators can see the iPads on their network and, just like with all other client devices, can see how much bandwidth they consume and what applications they are using.

To see those iPads, just search for “ipad” in the list of clients. This is an example from one of our customers’ networks:

iPad search result

Over the past month, 101 iPads connected to the network, and they transferred just over 67 GB in total. These search results are sorted by usage, so the top results listed are the iPad clients that consumed the most bandwidth.

Similarly, the Summary Report page lists the top clients on the network and lets you identify the most popular and most bandwidth-hungry clients on the network. Notice Apple iPad, iPhone, and iPod are all listed separately:

Summary report - Top operating systems

Once you’ve identified the iPads on the network, it’s also very easy to drill down and see what applications are being used on iPads, and which ones consume the most bandwidth. This example, from one of our customers running a network in a public area, shows an iPad that used over 3 GB of data in one month’s time. Over 75% of that was due to music and video consumption, and the tooltip shows Google Video alone accounted for more than 800 MB of the 3 GB.

Usage details of one iPad user

If you have already deployed a Meraki wireless network, see for yourself what impact iPads are having on your network. If you’d like to learn more, don’t miss our free webinar on integrating iPads into wireless networks on Thursday, May 26 at 11am PT. Register for free here.