Tanaza is 99% cloud based, delivered over the Internet. There is still 1% of the software that must be installed at the customer premise, on a host. The piece installed at the customer premise is the Tanaza Agent. The Agent is an IP packet forwarder, a process allowing data packets to be forwarded from one machine or device to another, allowing Tanaza Cloud to talk to your AP devices. This means you can remotely manage them without the need to setup complex VPNs, Public IPs addresses or Dynamic DNS. And you don’t need to change the firmware of your APs either:- Tanaza can work with the original firmware by Netgear, TP-Link, Ubiquiti, Engenius, and other vendors.
This architecture has been appreciated by a lot of System Integrators that install WLANs in Small Businesses, Hotels, Schools, and Hospitals. They often deploy a lot of autonomous APs and it’s common to have at least one server in the same LAN of the APs. That server would be the place where to deploy the Tanaza Agent, the 1% non-cloud part of our AP management solution.
Recently some Managed Solutions Providers expressed to us, “they didn’t like to need a host at the customers’ premise”. So, apparently that 1% non-cloud was the problem.
Well, our engineers took the challenge and came up with a solution: the Tanaza firmware! It embeds the Tanaza Agent directly inside the 3rd party APs! Our guys did their research and put in some long hours studying the problem while crafting the solution. Then we internally released the Alfa version of Tanaza firmware, based on OpenWRT.
We ran some tests with our Lead User group and they were impressed, especially when they saw all their Tanaza Powered Access Points popping up in the Tanaza interface and being “auto-discovered”.
According to the Lead User group the auto-discovery feature allows you to save a lot of time while doing the “first configuration” at the customer premise.
So… with Tanaza firmware we can now offer 100% Cloud-based AP Management! It’s a good start… but we are still working on improvements.
The firmware is currently public and available only for some Ubiquiti Access Points, but we have some other ideas for the future. Stay tuned!
If you have an Ubiquiti device such as UniFi, PicoStation, NanoStation, AirRouter and want to try to upgrade it to a Tanaza Powered AP, you can get the Tanaza firmware from here. You’ll also find instructions to flash your devices and an How to add them to your Tanaza account guide.
Have you tried it? Let us know how you like it on our community web site.