ACADEMIA

Extreme Networks announced that it has reached a milestone of 300 cloud and data center customers for its all-Ethernet Open Fabric solution. Extreme Networks Open Fabric is based on 40 GbE network technologies that use open standards protocols such as M-LAG (Multi-Switch Link Aggregation) and Data Center Bridging (DCB). With 300 deployments worldwide, Extreme Networks has twice the number of Open Fabric deployments as Juniper's QFabric, based on Juniper's own reported number of customers discussed by the company during its earnings, April 24th.

"We believe mobile devices, web apps and cloud infrastructures are driving one of the largest network upgrade periods in 20 years," said Oscar Rodriguez, president and CEO of Extreme Networks. "Being first to market with a 40 GbE network fabric allows our customers to upgrade their networks for new cloud, data center and mobile applications. Our all-Ethernet Open Fabric solution is well positioned to gain market share."

Extreme Networks Open Fabric customer examples include LINX, VMware and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Customers also include leading mobile carriers worldwide. About half of the Open Fabric customers are enterprise data centers, one quarter are mobile operators, and 20 percent are cloud-scale data centers. Others include high performance computing (HPC) and government security customers.

Extreme Networks Open Fabric solution is available on its next-generation switches such as Extreme Networks Summit X650 & X670 and the new BlackDiamond X8. The BlackDiamond X8 was released in February 2012 and has won several awards, including the 2012 Data Centre Product of the Year award from Network Computing magazine in the UK.

"The best way to measure the impact of change driven by the new data center is profiling the adoption of more efficient and faster network designs by a range of customers," said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst for ZK Research. "Extreme Networks is now delivering on its vision for mobility and this really matters."

Extreme Networks Open Fabric data center and cloud switching architecture enables greatly increased performance, ultra-low latency, converged storage capabilities such as DCB, and energy efficiency. The Summit X670, Summit X650 and BlackDiamond X8 products offer customers a highly flexible and automate 10 and 40 GbE architecture.