When Archer and his team saw the simplicity of the web-based Meraki dashboard, they knew the ease of management would help their school’s distributed network.
Increased visibility was a big reason his team chose Meraki “We now have greater insight if someone is having a problem with their particular device — We are able to pinpoint where that person is, what their signal strength is, which access point they are connected to, and why they might be having that problem. This level of visibility is something that we did not have access to before Meraki,” said Archer.
With the number of students, buildings, and devices continuing to increase, the school wanted to minimize the need for on-site IT staff while maximizing the ability to deploy new parts of their network infrastructure faster.
With Cisco Meraki, network management via web dashboard allows seamless troubleshooting for IT team
UNIS Hanoi implemented 130+ Meraki MR42, MR52, and MR74 Wave 2 802.11ac access points throughout the campus, both in classrooms as well as on outdoor sports fields, to allow students to access the network no matter where they are on campus.
The school also deployed 20+ MS225 and MS425 switches to replace their legacy switches. Using the port scheduling and topology features has allowed the IT team to have granular control and visibility into their network. They have also taken advantage of the 10 GbE uplink to provide students and staff with faster download speeds.
The deployment was faster and easier than Archer expected. “Some of the traditionally challenging aspects of deployment such as configuring and troubleshooting took minimal time thanks to the ease of configuration with the web-based Meraki dashboard,” Archer said. He added that “the configuration of Meraki was the easy part,” and the most time-consuming part was the physical aspects of the deployment, such as removing the old access points, physically installation of the access points, and unplugging cables from the old equipment.
For the configuration, the IT team took advantage of the ability to pre-stage in the dashboard while their Meraki access points and switches were in transit. “We were able to pre-configure our Meraki access points and switches before they even arrived. This saved us a lot of time and made the deployment process much simpler,” Archer said.
The MR74 outdoor access points provided an easy deployment experience for the UNIS Hanoi IT team. To reach the sidelines of the outdoor sports field, all the UNIS Hanoi IT team needed to do was install them on the side of one of the buildings, thanks to the multi-user 2x2 multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO) technology of the MR74. To cover the rest of the field, UNIS Hanoi plans to install more Meraki outdoor access points on the other side of the field.
Learn more about Meraki MS switches, the industry's first line cloud managed access and aggregation switches
Read the Meraki MS Series Switches Family Datasheet
Learn more about Meraki MR access points, the world's first enterprise-grade line of cloud-managed WLAN access points.
Read the Meraki MR Access Point Datasheet
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