As Skype for Business continues to gain traction in the enterprise – regardless of how many name changes Microsoft’s UC solution has gone through, the one constant is the need for bandwidth on corporate networks to handle the increased load of voice and video calls. For this reason, Extreme Networks has been focusing on helping customers set up software-defined networks allowing for bandwidth to be requested and granted on-demand in order to ensure communications has the required bandwidth it needs via OpenDaylight integration.
The Extreme Networks OneController… An Open, Standards-Based SDN Controller Providing Simple, Fast, and Smart Automation and Orchestration
In addition, at Interop 2015, Extreme touted a bunch of SDN enhancements it has made including:
- Group Based Policy – Integrates Extreme Networks’ NetSight management application with OpenDaylight Group-Based Policy (GBP) to deploy consistent network policies across a multivendor network.
- SDN Applications Store – Offers an online repository of paid and free apps for customers and technology solution partners’ Software Defined Networks.
- SDN Developer Portal – Provides third-party developers of SDN applications with the necessary information needed for developing, submitting and managing their applications in the Extreme Networks app store.
At the show I met with a number of people from the company including: Markus Nispel, Vice President Solutions Architecture and Innovation, John Hanahan, VP Product Management and Marketing and Derek Granath, Senior Director Product Management and they seemed quite enthused about recent wins such as a 32-school system in the town of Enfield, Connecticut and University of New England in Australia.
Common themes were the ability to allow users to dial up and down bandwidth as needed without the need for admins to get involved. This could be useful in a university lab for example that may need lots of bandwidth for a few hours per day.
In addition, according to Markus, the tight integration with SIP servers means there is a better ability to diagnose problems with devices on the network and reduce TTR.
As IP communications becomes a larger part of the communications mix on corporate networks and the need to dynamically allocate bandwidth increases, we can expect the need for intelligent SDN to increase and certainly Extreme Networks wants to add more wins as they help customers enhance their network infrastructure.
My Last interview with Extreme networks took place late last year with Philip Johnston focusing on more application/network intelligence for the CIO
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