Extreme Networks wants your complicated Wi-Fi environments

Wi-Fi is hard, but if Extreme can make it work in these stadiums, it can certainly do so in traditional carpeted offices.

3. Wi-Fi 6E/7 will likely require a wired refresh.

I’ve been in networking a long time. My days as an engineer pre-date Wi-Fi, and I don’t ever remember a wireless upgrade driving a refresh of the wired network. However, as with many things in life, there is a first time for everything. The 6 Ghz spectrum on Wi-Fi 6E/7 pushes the wireless connection close to 1 Gbps of throughout. This means multiple Wi-Fi clients connected over Ghz will cause the wired network to bottleneck. Almost every customer I talked to said they weren’t sure at first whether a wired upgrade was necessary, but after only a short time, upgraded the campus to a multi-gig network. Any business out there planning for Wi-Fi 6E/7 should also be planning to go from 1 Gig-E to 2.5/5 Gig-E on the wired network.

4. Extreme’s Fabric remains the industry’s best kept secret.

It seems every network vendor has a fabric, but not all fabrics are created equal. Extreme is only of only two vendors (the other is Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise) that has an SPB based fabric, which operates at Layer 2. The L2 fabric has some significant benefits over L3, but SPB has trouble scaling, which is why the technology has been used historically in data centers.

To solve the scale-out problem, Extreme developed something called a “multi-area fabric,” giving customers the scale of an L3 fabric with the simplicity and reliability of an L2 (more on this in a future post). Every Extreme customer I talk to loves the technology, although several of them admit they were a bit skeptical at first given so few vendors support SPB.

I talked the Farid Farouq, vice president of innovation for the Dubai World Trade Center, at the event, and he explained how the Extreme Fabric enables his team to run 500 events at the facility each year. For many events, the IT team must set up custom virtual networks within the physical network for security and other purposes. With a traditional L3 network, the days of work it would take to make this happen isn’t realistic given the fast turnarounds. But the L2 fabric can be reconfigured in a matter of hours. The Extreme Fabric has been and continues to be the network industry’s best kept secret, but for customers that embrace SPB, the benefits are clearly there.

5. It’s go time for Extreme Networks.

This year is the 10-year anniversary for CEO Ed Meyercord and COO Norman Rice, the dynamic duo that changed what was once a forgotten company. Over the past decade, the company has been rebuilt using homegrown innovation coupled with some shrewd acquisitions, including the Avaya Network business (which brought the fabric), Aerohive (cloud Wi-Fi management), Motorola’s Wi-Fi business, and Brocade (data center). Each acquisition brought new customers, products, people and technology.