While AI was the headliner at Connect, another strong undercurrent emerged that is worthy of note. Throughout the conference, a recurring theme was related to the overall excellent experience that customers were having with Extreme’s Network Fabric solution. More than one customer called Extreme Fabric out as what truly makes Extreme Networks different from anyone else in the market.

Based on 802.1aq SPB and leveraging advanced inter-switch signaling, Extreme’s design goal has been to achieve simplicity, flexibility, and reliability to degrees that are unmatched in the marketplace today. Of note is the ease of deployment, the flexibility for fast reconfiguration, the ability to stretch VLANs with just a few clicks, and inherent resilience, all provided by a high degree of automation that typically delivers sub-second reconvergence rates. And these were exactly the outcomes that customers and partners articulated at the conference:

A large international expo center must build and rebuild huge networks every week, as exhibitions come and go through the facility. Per the vice president of IT, “Extreme Networks was the only vendor that could meet our demands of network scale, elasticity, and simplicity.”

A regional hospital in the EU has found the resilience to be beyond expectations. “The core network of our hospital hasn’t been down for about eleven years now. Never failed,” said a senior network administrator.

A port operator in eastern Europe has seen value in the ease of deployment as well. An IT infrastructure architect related, “The Extreme Networks Fabric solution has an extremely high level of automation which significantly reduces the administrative resources required to manage and expand the network.”

While Extreme Fabric is hitting design goals, the addition of fully functional support within Extreme Platform ONE will help customers even more, by bringing direct visual understanding, for the first time, of the interrelated nature of physical, logical, and service topologies.