MERAKI - All New Dashboard Radio Settings Page

Meraki’s AutoRF technology performs automatic cloud-based, system-wide network optimization to ensure peak network performance in any environment.  Each AP on a Meraki network continually monitors its environment for interference from other APs and feeds this information back to the Cloud Controller.  Last month we added Spectrum Analysis, mitigating interference from non-WiFi devices like microwave ovens and Bluetooth headsets.

AutoRF has always run quietly in the background.  But now, our new Radio Settings page gives you more visibility into what’s happening behind the scenes, and exposes new controls for advanced configuration.

The new Radio Power selector either allows the Cloud Controller to automatically dial back transmit power if it detects adjacent access points stepping on each others’ toes, or allows you to maintain full power for all APs.

The Channel Planning Report sheds light on how AutoRF is tuning your network, providing  visibility into the current channel and transmit power settings for each AP,  as well as the interference sources that were avoided.  If you click on the “Details” link next to each row in the table, you will find a detailed report for all of the APs in your network on a particular channel.

Regular users of the Cloud Controller will notice that some settings previously found under Network Wide Settings have moved to this page, where they fit naturally.

We hope that you find this Radio Settings page helps you better understand how the Cloud Controller is optimizing your network, and helps you to make more informed decisions about how to use the Cloud Controller’s RF controls.  Please let us know what you like, what you don’t, and what you’d like to see next!

http://meraki.com/blog/2010/10/all-new-dashboard-radio-settings-page/


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EXPAND NETWORKS - PUT WAN OPTIMIZATION TO THE TEST ON YOUR NETWORK

	PUT EXPAND ACCELERATORS TO THE TEST ON YOUR NETWORK      Expand's Industry leading Wan Optimization technology enables the building blocks to deliver and control centralized Branch Office IT infrastructures over the WAN. Ensuring your branch office users receive acceptable SLA response times, ensuring maximum user productivity. Your Free 15 Day Evaluation Expand Networks enables you to see how your current WAN is performing. With more optimization, functionality, and reliability residing in a single appliance, Expand Technology means WAN Optimization makes business sense. - Gain visibility into your WAN application & traffic flows - Apply Layer 7 QoS to prioritize business critical applications - Avoid costly bandwidth upgrades using our virtual bandwidth features - Improve Application Response times over the WAN - Mitigate the impact of latency on WAN traffic flows Expand Networks reserves the right to limit, or restrict upon notice, participation in the offer to any person at any time for any reason. Best Regards, Expand Networks Simply click here and register your details for your 15 day evaluation Unsubscribe me from this contact list

MOBILEIRON - The Enterprise Smartphone is Dead

Today, I was watching my son trying to figure out why touching the screen on a BlackBerry Bold does nothing.

Last week, I saw a fantastic presentation from the most innovative IT organization in pharma talking about never building another enterprise app … instead building consumer apps for employees to use.
The week before, at CTIA, I saw some new Android “enterprise-class” phones and couldn’t help but think that design by committee never works.

Sure, there have been a ton of articles written about the consumerization of mobility and IT in general, in the enterprise.  But it did strike me that many of us have been looking at this trend through an inverted lens.
The IT organization in most companies is still adamant about trying to put in place policies and restrictions to make smartphones and tablets feel more like laptops, at least from a security and management perspective.  This is very understandable because the consequences of security failure are high and so we’re trying to keep the enterprise smartphone alive.  But we can’t resuscitate the dead (employees don’t want to use the “old-gen” devices) so we’re dressing up the newcomers to look like the predictable and known.

But it’s no longer about IT.  It’s about the user.  And that user – that person - is a consumer 24 hours a day.  Sometimes they consume personal services, and sometimes professional, but their expectations are equivalent for both.

There will be no more enterprise smartphones or tablets.  There will only be fantastic consumer experiences that can be configured securely.  So “enterprise” becomes a configuration option, not a design constraint.  If I don’t want to use a particular phone or tablet on the weekend, I also don’t want to use it during the week.
Instead of IT telling me “Here is the device you will use for wireless email“, I will now ask IT  “How will you give me a mobile work experience I love?”

Command-and-control will fracture and move to cooperation.  The enterprise risk increases, without a doubt, but so does the value.  That’s a scary equation for most companies because it feels uncertain.  But it is inevitable and  I’ll write in an upcoming blog about how some IT teams are taking on this challenge one step at a time.

http://mobileiron.com/blog/2010/10/the-enterprise-smartphone-is-dead/


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MERAKI - Leave the bug spray to us

Cisco recently issued a security advisory about several serious vulnerabilities for its wireless LAN controllers, including DoS, privilege escalation, and ACL bypass vulnerabilities. These liabilities could allow attackers to modify your controller’s configuration or bypass your ACLs—so if it were my network, I’d certainly want a fix.
Cisco issued software updates, but they’re no quick-snap remedy. Here’s what I’d need to do before I could download the new release:

1. Follow Cisco’s instructions on the command-line to determine which software version is running on my controller.
2. Verify if my software version is an affected release. If it is, confirm which versions are “fixed” and note the “recommended release.”
3. Download and install the patch.

A few of the steps for determining patch compatibility from cisco.com

The real kicker is what I’m signing up for when I actually install the patches.  From Cisco’s advisory:

In all cases, customers should exercise caution to be certain the devices to be upgraded contain sufficient memory and that current hardware and software configurations will continue to be supported properly by the new release…  Prior to deploying software, customers should consult their maintenance provider or check the software for feature set compatibility and known issues specific to their environment.

We don’t mean to pick on Cisco here, and we certainly aren’t implying that one vendor’s products are more secure than another’s.  With any complex system, bugs and security patches will happen.  But the customer experience of dealing with these patches for traditional, behind-the-firewall appliances like wireless controllers is a royal pain. At best, they result in headaches, downtime, and frustration.  At worst, administrators miss patches altogether, and their systems are vulnerable.  Fortunately, The Cloud points to a better way.

The Cloud Controller, like other cloud applications such as Gmail and Salesforce.com, is always up to date.  We push out new features, bug fixes, performance improvements, etc. several times a day.  This is completely invisible to the customer, save for new features appearing from time to time.  (How we do this, and maintain quality, is pretty interesting, but we’ll save that for another post.)

But what about the firmware running on our APs?  They aren’t in the cloud…  Are they resigned to the fate of traditional patch management?

Fortunately, an AP that can be managed from the cloud can also be upgraded from the cloud, seamlessly and automatically.  Our Cloud Controller knows with certainty that all of the Meraki access points deployed around the world are up to date, with the latest features, fixes, and yes, security patches.

Since we can install firmware seamlessly, over the web, we’ve been able to release new firmware every three months or so, continually delivering new features to our customers. We just did one, in fact – with firmware support for application-aware traffic shaping.

Here’s what our customers saw in their dashboard before the update:

Firmware Upgrade Notification in the Meraki Dashboard

Customers can let the upgrade happen on its own, schedule it when they want it, or click “Upgrade Now” to get it right away. It’s worth noting that the upgrade process was engineered to be completely fault tolerant.  Say, for example, you lose power in the middle of a firmware update.  No problem, the AP will boot up with its previous firmware once power is restored.  This technology has let us do quarterly upgrades for four years straight and keep customers happy.

We’re excited about how this system has not only eliminated headaches for our customers, but has also enabled us to innovate much faster.  We hope to see this architecture spread to other types of infrastructure, so patch management nightmares some day become a thing of the past.


http://meraki.com/blog/2010/10/leave-the-bug-spray-to-us/


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MERAKI - What’s better than Traffic Visibility? Traffic Shaping!

Last month we announced our new Traffic Shaper feature and gave administrators unprecedented visibility into the wireless traffic on their network, providing the ability to see what might be bogging down their network, be it YouTube, BitTorrent or too many users uploading pictures to Facebook.  Now, with the new Traffic Shaper page in Dashboard, administrators finally have the tools to not only see what kinds of recreational applications are taking over their network but to do something about it!
Administrators can now create application-specific shaping policies for total control over their wireless bandwidth.  Let's say your Sales team needs snappy access to Salesforce.com at all times, but most of Engineering is streaming World Series games and consuming all of your bandwidth.  With Traffic Shaper, shaping policies can be created that apply per user bandwidth limits for specific applications such as video streaming sites, as well as apply QoS priority levels at both Layer 2 and 3 to make sure your Salesforce traffic gets prioritized across the network.
To make setting up new shaping policies fast and simple, we have created pre-defined groups of applications that administrators most commonly want to shape:


Administrators can also create more specific policies for particular applications using HTTP hostnames (eg. salesforce.com), IP and port numbers.  Here is an example of a typical shaping policy that you would see in an office setting:

In this example, a rule has been created to apply a 1 Mbps bandwidth limit to all users on the Meraki-Corp SSID for Peer-to-Peer and streaming video and music applications.  A second rule has also been created to provide Layer 3 QoS prioritization to applications that are critical to this business, Salesforce.com and Dropbox.com, as well as to provide unlimited bandwidth to these applications.
Since Traffic Shaper can leverage the intelligence of over 16,000 customer networks through the Meraki Cloud Controller, Traffic Shaper's database of application signatures is always updated.  As new P2P and social media applications appear on the scene, they will be quickly fingerprinted and added to the Cloud Controller database for our customer networks so that administrators are never caught unaware by the next BitTorrent.
Traffic Shaper can now be found under the Configure tab in Dashboard.  If you are interested in learning more about how Traffic Shaper works, we invite you to join us for a webinar that we'll be conducting about Traffic Shaper on November 2nd.  Details can be found here:
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NTT Europe Announces First Phase of Global Rollout for Enhanced ...

NTT Europe is today announcing the launch of its Compute Cloud service to be offered under NTT Com's BizCITY(R) concept of providing secure access to enterprise services from anyplace at anytime. Further launches into new territories are expected in Q1 2011 to enhance NTT Com's desire to provide truly global product offerings with one contract, one SLA and one customer portal.

NTT Europe has successfully been providing private cloud (Global Virtualization Services: branded BizHosting Global inJapan) and public cloud (OpSource-powered Cloud Solution) solutions. The new Compute Cloud service will further complement these existing offerings. Customers will be able to redistribute network, compute and storage resources between multiple environments, on-demand whilst maintaining high levels of security and accountability. This function allows customers to meet the needs of different types of environments such as: Live/Production, Test/Pre-production, Customer Trials, Development Playgrounds/Sandboxes, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.

In order to control Compute Cloud, users will have a dedicated customer portal giving them the ability to remotely manage the Compute Cloud environment. Customers can deploy, configure and delete virtual machines as required, monitoring performance requirements in real time. Resources can be scaled for purpose at the click of a button, whilst a pay-as-you-go pricing structure ensures customers only pay for what they use.

Stephane Estevez, Product Marketing Manager of NTT Europe, said "The profile of the individual project or the application being put into the cloud determines the type of cloud service required. When it comes to IT infrastructure, there is always a balancing act, and it is very clear to us that it is the level of performance required of the application and its business sensitivity, not the size of the company, that determines which service is best suited. NTT Europe can design solutions of multiple cloud configurations helping customers to reap the benefits of each and manage the integration between them and existing in-house IT infrastructures."

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Meraki Aims for Enterprise – eWeek | Headset Walkie Talkie

The latest update to Meraki Cloud Controllers and 802.11n access points adds application visibility and throttling capability, along with some limited spectrum visibility for non-WiFi interference.

The latest update to the Meraki Cloud Controller and Meraki’s 802.11n access points delivers a hit-and-miss collection of enterprise-class features designed to provide customers with improved visibility into and control over WiFi usage, along with automated reactions to non-WiFi sources of interference.

 

Released to customers at the end of September, the update delivers a suite of new features designed to help optimize and streamline network performance to Meraki’s APs and Cloud Controller. New application and content insight into wireless traffic grants Meraki the ability to fine-tune network performance by shaping traffic usage on specific networks, while Auto RF gives the network some self-healing capabilities with the ability to compensate against both WiFi and non-WiFi interferers.  

I tested the Meraki Cloud Controller in conjunction with a pair of Meraki MR14 access points, replacing our corporate WiFi deployment with the Meraki products for just under a month, servicing dozens of users and devices on two different WiFi networks over that time. Each MR-14 costs $799 and offers a pair of dual-band 802.11n radios (2 stream, 2 by 2 MIMO) and a single 802.3af Power-over-Ethernet-compliant gigabit Ethernet port. Licensing for the Cloud Controller costs an additional $150 for one year and includes product support, maintenance, and upgrades, or purchasers may opt for the three-year license for $300 each.

New application visibility provides detailed information about network usage, identifying not only network ports and protocols used but specific application information as well, in order to help break out how Web traffic is being consumed. Meraki utilizes its global network to help fingerprint Web applications, helping them suss out identifying application characteristics and behaviors and organizing applications into categories. Meraki claims application fingerprints are updated to Cloud Controllers all the time, so the network should be able to respond quickly if an application changes its behavior.

Administrators can view application usage information on global or a personal scale. I found I could look at traffic from the last two hours, or the last day, week or month and access pie charts displaying the traffic mix over that time, highlighting sites or applications used most. For example, in my network, I found that over a month, 63.2 percent of the aggregate WiFI traffic consisted of encrypted SSL traffic to Microsoft.com. Skype, generic Web traffic to non-fingerprinted sites, Exchange traffic to our hosted e-mail provider and Windows File sharing traffic rounded out the top five applications over that time.

Usage totals for the individual WiFi clients are broken out below the pie charts. Meraki leverages the user name (if using user-based network authentication) or the device host name to identify the device, rather than the MAC address, making it easier to attribute a device to a user. Drilling down into an individual client displays more application information, breaking out network port usage, application usage and HTTP content mixes into separate pie charts. I also found I could create my own customized pie charts for the applications, sites or network services I specifically want to track.

Beyond the fun Orwellian aspect of knowing pretty much everything that my wireless users have been up to for the last month, Meraki utilizes this information for something constructive as well, delivering traffic-shaping capability beyond simple port-based QoS. Specifically, with Traffic Shaper, administrators can create rules to limit a user’s bandwidth usage for a specific type of traffic or, if not yet fingerprinted, for a specific Website. These throughput limits can be aggregated, or set separately for both uplink and downlink traffic. Meraki offers several different categories of traffic that can be shaped: music/video, e-mail, VOIP/Video conferencing or peer-to-peer networking, among others.

As an example, I was able to limit video services to each client attached to one of my wireless networks (I set up Meraki to service two networks) to just 100 kilobits per second. This caused the Netflix application running on an iPhone associated to that network to provide a much choppier experience with lots of pauses for buffering, while a network speed test performed using the same device was not subject to the same throughput limitations.

Following the path well blazed over the last six months by Cisco, Aruba and Meru, with this update Meraki added spectrum analysis functionality to their APs and Cloud Controller with the new Auto RF feature. Auto RF allows the Meraki network to hear non-WiFi sources of interference cluttering up the RF around the network and adjust network settings to compensate automatically. However, I was underwhelmed with the feature compared to similar capabilities of those other products, finding Meraki’s implementation less helpful and less configurable.

To force a manual interference scan, I had to switch the AP's mode, causing the AP to reject client connections to both radios (on the other hand, both Cisco and Aruba allow client connections during RF scanning). This requirement is especially unfortunate because the Cloud Controller only shows RF data for the 2.4 GHz band, meaning one radio is taken offline for no apparent reason.

The RF data presented from a manual scan to the administrator is fairly underwhelming. The Cloud Controller shows an instantaneous sample of the detected interference signal strength and affected part of the spectrum, as well as a cumulative distribution that shows those detections over time. But the scans only display noise levels, so while the feature may quantify interference generated by a microwave oven or wireless camera, Meraki won’t explicitly identify the possible source of the interference. The administrator has to figure out what is causing the noise, then go try to find it. Not that Meraki presents any information to help correlate those findings across APs.

Auto RF, on the other hand, listens for non-WiFi noise as part of the AP's normal course of operation, listening by default on channels being serviced by the AP, and to the other channels as part of either scheduled or opportunistic sweeps of the spectrum. APs package up both WiFi and non-WiFi interferer data and send it all to the Cloud Controller, where current and historical data is analyzed against algorithms derived from thousands of other Meraki networks around the world.

Using that data, Auto RF can change an AP's channel assignment via the Cloud Controller when needed to work around interference, or it can adjust the radio transmit power levels. The network also now bumps capable clients from 5 GHz over the 2.4 GHz band to avoid the more congested airspace altogether. With a stark lack of a front end for Auto RF, however, it doesn’t appear there is a way at this time for an administrator to customize threshold levels for radio change events.

Also, manual interference scans tended to fail after limited use during my tests. One of my APs could conduct an interference scan for 5 to 10 minutes, while the other would fail in under a minute. The AP logs failed to identify a cause of this problem, but I’d hazard a guess it has to do with a lack of available memory on the AP.

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