CIO calls Meraki network 'one of the best purchasing decisions I've made in my career'
Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., was the first school in the country to deploy an all-802.11n network when, four years ago, it rolled out 290 Meraki access points to bring nearly complete coverage to dorms, classrooms and campus buildings.
Westmont College was the first school in the country to deploy an all-802.11n network when, four years ago, it rolled out 290 Meraki access points to bring nearly complete coverage to dorms, classrooms and campus buildings.
So, it’s no surprise that CIO Reed Sheard is moving quickly to keep Westmont College, a small liberal arts school in Santa Barbara, Calif., on the cutting edge by upgrading to 802.11ac. And the fact that Cisco bought Meraki in 2012 is a plus, Sheard says, because the college’s wired infrastructure just happens to be 100% Cisco.
“We have no traditional Cisco wireless equipment in our network and, thus, no on-premise controllers or software management tools,” says Sheard. “The real benefit of the purchase of Meraki by Cisco is that it makes for a more predictable future between our wired and wireless partners working together as a single organization.”
According to Sheard, the college has bolstered its existing 802.11n network with 100 Meraki/Cisco MR34 802.11ac access points, and is currently rolling out another 100. All of the wireless traffic links back to the Cisco wired network.
I don’t want to sound like a commercial, but Meraki Cisco was one of the best purchasing decisions I’ve made in my career as a CIO. The stuff just works; it’s easy to extend and manage.
— CIO Reed Sheard
Sheard says one of the best features of the Meraki network is its cloud-based management system, which allows a broad range of system administrators to manage the network. He adds, “Our hope is that Cisco will be influenced by Meraki to move more management tools for the network infrastructure to a cloud-based model.”
+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Santa Clara University graduates to Gigabit Wi-Fi | Macbook Pro delivers blazing speed in Gigabit Wi-Fi test +
Need for speed
“The answer to why upgrade is simple: speed, speed, and speed; plus, I might add, pervasive and stable,” says Sheard. “I don’t want to sound like a commercial, but Meraki Cisco was one of the best purchasing decisions I’ve made in my career as a CIO. The stuff just works; it’s easy to extend and manage. I just want to take that stability, and the fact that we’ve got it over our entire campus, and boast about how it’s bringing cutting edge speed to our network. And, I think the apps and the innovation that can happen when you have pervasiveness, stability, and speed is really going to open some doors for us as an institution.”
The ultimate benefit for the school is not speed for its own sake, but the applications that can run on top of the Wi-Fi network. “The Meraki model simply works, which allows my team to focus on more complex projects and/or new strategic initiatives,” says Sheard.
“Performance is, obviously, amazing and the benefits are limitless! By having a screaming, fast, wireless backbone; we can get rich content out there and not have to worry about the user experience, which kills it if we don’t get it right the first time. Students won’t come back and use the apps we’ve worked so hard to create, if these projects initially fail,” says Sheard.
For example, the college has a Learning Management System (LMS), which contains all of the school’s academic content. An analysis showed that LMS usage peaked in the late afternoon and from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m.
The rest of the time, students who were online were using the network mostly for entertainment, social or personal use.
“We discovered,” says Sheard, “that people take their phones out of their pockets an average of 150 times a day, so we theorized that if we could get academic content such as physics, economic theory, mathematics, and the other various courses onto our students’ cell phones and tablets, then students would use our LMS 24/7.”
So the IT group developed apps that gave students access from their phones to that learning content on the LMS and then monitored the usage, which soared in all timeframes.
Sheard adds that students who want to review a lecture or part of a lecture, repeatedly, can now do so because the new 802.11ac standard makes this possible. Instead of wasting 10 minutes texting while waiting for a bus or shuttle, students can use that time to catch up on a lecture or class they missed.
There are more than 1,200 students, which may not sound like a lot, but, on any given day, there are more than 3,000 iOS devices on Westmont’s network. “We want to move more of our core data to these devices. And we’re quite confident that when we do that, students will consume it. In a nutshell, that’s good for our mission, good for the college, and good for the student.”
Westmont College also has a shuttle bus system that takes students to various locations in Santa Barbara. The IT department at Westmont developed a GPS system that interacts with its data network to give students live updates regarding where the shuttles are on campus, or anywhere in the greater Santa Barbara area, and maps directly to the specific shuttle schedules.
“The students really like this app because it gives them the sense of freedom without sitting at the bus stop wondering when the next shuttle will come back. This was just a little creative thing that we were able to do again because we can count on our wireless network,” says Sheard. “Another plus for our users is the opportunity and ease for our guests to access and use our network, safely and securely, with minimal to no impact. These are all benefits of the Gigabit Wi-Fi.”
Deployment
Since Westmont was using Meraki 802.11n access points, Sheard’s team found that the 802.11ac mounting brackets were identical, so deployment was a “no-brainer.”
Sheard’s team just pulled off the 802.11n access points and installed the new ones. For end users, if they don’t have 802.11ac-enabled devices, then the network fails over to N or (on a few occasions) to G, for individuals with older devices.
For the users, it’s completely transparent. “If there is anything unique to managing AC, which to my knowledge there isn’t,” says Sheard, “that disappears with the management console in Meraki Cisco.
Looking ahead, Sheard wonders if, at some point, the cellular network and the Wi-Fi network will start to converge. But whatever the next innovation in wireless communication turns out to be, “you can be sure that we’ll be one of the first schools out there to deploy it,” he says.
Sartain is a computers & technology journalist from Salt Lake City, Utah. She can be reached at julesds@comcast.net.
