Here at Extreme Networks we are fortunate to be in Silicon Valley, a part of the world blessed not only by tremendous technology and cultural diversity, but also blessed by nature with stunning mountains and redwood forests ringing the valley. These mountains also make for good times on motorcycles, one of the “extreme” pursuits I enjoy outside of Extreme Networks.

A while back I had a flash of insight, which is rare as I am not normally prone to such things. A friend was relatively new to motorcycles and was spending a great deal of time with books and videos and other such instructional aids. Despite this, he was still having trouble with tight uphill turns. We got together and I watched what he was doing and as it turned out some relatively minor changes in form were all he needed and suddenly he had a night and day type of transformation in his confidence when facing the bugbear of tight uphill turns.

That flash of insight is that regardless of the internet and other resources you might have at your command, there is no substitute for face time with folks who have been there and done that.

Extreme Networks cares about our channel partners. Here we are doing a five day Bootcamp session with distributor Catalyst Telecom.

That is why I was excited to hear from our guys in the field about their America’s Channel Bootcamp in Greenville, South Carolina, out on the East Coast. Instead of just emailing PowerPoints and PDFs or having webinars, Rob Karnbach got together with one of our distributors, Catalyst Telecom, and put together a five day TOI session for about 20 different solution providers.

The session broke down to four days of classroom instruction covering the latest and greatest. The industry moves quickly and we have introduced a number of new products and features over the past few years (BlackDiamond X8, Summit X670, Summit X440 & X430, SDN Support, AVB, Enhanced Physec Support and so on), so it was an excellent opportunity to get everyone up to speed on the new stuff as well as review traditional best practices.

Just like the new rider up in the hills, the folks in the class room and in the hands-on lab got more than just watching internet videos and staring at *.pptx decks, they also got to talk to peers from other solution providers as well as some of our more experienced SEs. It is amazing how sometimes just a couple minutes of Q&A can be worth weeks of email and solo study, particularly when you need to clear up some things that just are not clicking.

Anyway, it was great to get together with the solution providers who are the face of Extreme Networks in the field and it was great to see the positive reactions to the latest versions of ExtremeXOS and some of the new switches like the Summit X430.

If you are a solution provider or distributor, check out our Partner News Blog, which has all the latest and greatest for our partners in the channel.

Extreme Networks has always been focused on building the best Ethernet switches in the world. Over the years requirements for the network have changed and evolved, but we have always believed that aggressively priced, high performance hardware combined with a robust, modular, proven OS that runs on everything from edge to core is a winning combination that not only represents the best engineering available but also provides tremendous value to our customers.

For years we have felt that the network should be more intelligent and the design of our switches and the network OS that runs on them, ExtremeXOS, reflect this approach. We were pioneers in the real world applications of QoS and Identity Management and experience we gained there makes Software Defined Networking (SDN), OpenStack and OpenFlow all natural next steps for us.

With this in mind, we are excited to be at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara. ONS, running from 15-17 April, brings together the best and the brightest in the networking industry for forward looking talks and demos and this year is no exception.

We will be there with our SDN partners Big Switch Networks and NEC. With Big Switch Networks we will be showing interoperability with their SDN applications Big Virtual Switch and Big Tap. With NEC we will be showing interoperability with the NEC ProgrammableFlow Controller.

Regardless of how many turtles there are, the last one needs something to stand on.

While some like to say that SDN is bringing the commodification of networks, we need to point out that while some abstraction and virtualization is good, that it isn’t turtles all the way down. At some point, underneath all that fancy software, you are going to need some fancy hardware too and the fancier your software is, the fancier your hardware is going to need to be in order to keep pace. Remember, affordable or not, it’s still rocket science!

This is why we are proud to have the industry’s first Automated Flow Management and hardware-based QoS for SDN flows. Remember the old adage, do in hardware what you can and do in software that which you must, an adage that is alive and well today even in the world of software defined networking. That last turtle needs to stand somewhere, right?

If you are at ONS, come see us at Booth 304. We will also be at NEC in booth 103 and Big Switch Networks in booth 307. The official PR for Extreme Networks at ONS is here.

At Extreme Networks we focus on building the best Ethernet switches in the world. Our Ethernet data center architecture, the Open Fabric, reflects this approach by bringing together a compelling combination of open standards with high speed, low latency, low power, lossless, resilient multipath and advanced automation and scripting. An approach like this helps ensure that those who want to build a best of breed network can do so with confidence.

The Open Fabric Edge combines the attributes of the Extreme Networks open fabric with IT edge services.

The world is coming together over Ethernet. In the past different services ran on different networks. Just like there used to be a dedicated analog network for voice/PBX, video used to be the same way. Now we see a single, shared Ethernet infrastructure providing the connectivity for voice, video and data. It gets even better than that, though. It isn’t just data moving over Ethernet, increasingly it’s power for the end device as well in the form of Power over Ethernet (PoE, or its burlier cousin, PoE+).

The Open Fabric Edge is all about removing silos and 1:N Convergence

With an intelligent network, the edge is an exciting place. The edge is where services are done and the edge is where users and devices come in. For example, you probably want to assign different access rights to different devices.  An IP camera probably doesn’t need to see source code repositories nor is it likely a desk phone need access to payroll backend systems. Neither should be doing port scans and if they did both should probably be blocked from the network.

Speaking of physical security and IP cameras, having the ability to easily manage cameras, including cycling power via PoE/PoE+, is not only convenient but can result in considerable savings as camera resets no longer require truck rolls or climbing ladders as they can be achieved via an easy to use web interface. See screen grab, below:

Extreme Networks Chalet provides an easy to use GUI to manage PoE/PoE+ and other physical security related issues.

But the Extreme Networks Open Fabric Edge is more about enabling things than blocking them. For example, we have partnered with Microsoft to help deliver the best possible user experience for their unified communications platform, Lync. Lync integrates well with Outlook/Exchange as you would expect from Microsoft. Lync 2013 even includes cool video codec upgrades, including H.264 SVC. Long and short of it is that this enhancement alone should allow for better quality video over roughly half the bandwidth.

Despite this more efficient use of bandwidth, the end user quality of experience is still dependent upon having a good network underpinning all the magic happening on various servers and endpoints. That is where we come in. With low latency, low jitter and no lost packets, we provide exactly the quality foundation upon which a good unified communications system can be built.

Same thing for BYOD and Wireless. We have a sophisticated architecture that eliminates controller backhaul bottlenecks. This means better performance and scalability but we still don’t sacrifice our commitment to open standards or cost effective performance. Our wired switches operate just as well with access points from other vendors, not just Extreme and we offer an onboarding portal solution via partner CloudPath.

Another system for locking in the right kind of QoS for sensitive applications is AVB – audio video bridging, a system originally developed to help free the Pro A/V community from the tyranny of the analog cable rat’s nest.  With AVB enabled, houses of worship, concert halls, theaters and other venues are no longer forced to build multiple networks, they can now run everything over a single Ethernet infrastructure. The traffic that needs to be protected and delivered with very strict timing, is, while that which is not critical happens best effort.

In the end, it’s all about breaking down silos and making the most of your network. One way to cope with budgets that are not growing and demands that are is to do more with less and one way of doing that is to run additional services over a single Ethernet network and that is exactly what the Open Fabric Edge is all about.

Want to learn more?

Extreme Networks Open Fabric Edge Press Release

Extreme Networks Open Fabric Edge Landing Page

Extreme Networks Open Fabric Edge White Paper

The network is at the center of the Barco “OR over IP” approach.

The world is getting older and with the greying of the world’s population comes increased demand for medical care. This increased demand for medical care comes with a real need to contain rising costs. One example is in the field of radiology where salaries in the range of $300k-$400k per year have been par for the course.

The costs of surgery don’t just come from the high salaries of certain specialists, though. The hospital operating theater itself helps contribute. When you look at the equipment in a surgical theater, the various endoscopy cameras, patient monitoring devices, C-arms and other equipment and devices, it’s doesn’t take much imagination to see that the setup, teardown, maintenance and configuration of all these various pieces of equipment is going to be a time consuming and expensive task. You also have issues similar to those faced by pro AV in terms of large and growing rats nests of analog and proprietary digital cables.

In the pro AV world, we helped solve these problems with the AVnu Alliance and a technology called AVB. In the medical world we are solving these similar problems with Ethernet and a company called Barco.

The folks at Barco have come up with a solution they call the digital operating room or “OR over IP,” an approach that leverages the Extreme Networks Open Fabric approach to high performance, highly reliable 10 Gigabit Ethernet and combines it with their Nexxis OR Management software, digital adapters that convert video and other data to IP, HD surgical displays and other components.

With standardized Ethernet connections, build-out and tear down and maintenance are no longer as long and hard as they were, nor as expensive. With Ethernet, it’s all plug’n’play.

Modern medicine generates  a lot of imagery and video, much of it uncompressed. In order to share imagery and enable collaboration, the network must not only move data very quickly, it must do so with little latency and no dropped packets or artifacted images. Of course, with patient privacy concerns being a very real consideration in light of some of the teeth HIPAA has been shown to have grown, security, identity awareness and policy based enforcement are also nice things to have and Extreme Networks delivers on all counts.

For more on Barco OR-over-IP and Extreme Networks, check out our press release or take a moment and watch the Barco video below: