Scaling the Summit

Extreme Networks, Inc. has announced the expansion of its Open Fabric data center solutions, delivering performance and investment protection for customers with purpose built solutions. The company today launched the Summit® X770, a highly scalable Top of Rack (TOR) switch that offers the industry’s highest port density of 10GbE and advanced scalability, programmability and robust software features addressing Big Data and the cloud.

According to Gartner, Big Data investments in 2013 continued to rise, with 64 percent of organizations investing or planning to invest in Big Data technology compared with 58 percent in 2012. The trends for customers to harvest valuable information through Big Data initiatives, and to build out virtualized cloud infrastructures, are driving the need for more robust bandwidth and resilient fabric network, where Petabytes of data and converged traffic are stored and transferred over latency-sensitive infrastructures.

Big Data positively impacts a wide array of industries. For example, the medical field uses data sets such as the Genetics Home Reference to map specific genes and chromosomes to genetic conditions. In addition, by analyzing real-time tweets and social media feeds, companies are able to predict the direction of a hurricane as well as sentiment mining for product placements.

In order to support this bandwidth while supporting collapsed and efficient network designs, Extreme’s new Summit® X770 fabric switches support TRILL for lossless performance and resiliency, features front to back (or back to front) cooling and redundant n+1 power supplies. The Summit® X770 and the ExtremeXOS combine the following innovations:
· Industry leading performance – first to support 104 wire-speed 10GbE ports in 1RU
· 32 40GbE Ports in 1RU for switch interconnections, and ultra-fast HPC server connectivity
· TRILL for Layer 2 multipath and multi-hop routing resulting in resilient, penalty free operation
· Low latency of less than 600 nanoseconds and less than 3.5 microseconds port-to-port when combined in a Fabric with BlackDiamond® X8 core switches
· Flexibility to serve as either a core or edge switch in the data center
· Powerful cross-platform stacking with 1GbE/10GbE/40GbE Summit models
· Support of Software Defined Networking (SDN) with OpenStack and OpenFlow

"DataChambers provides its customers with a full complement of IT management services and business continuity solutions, protecting their data and ensuring that it is delivered when and where it's needed," said EJ Schwartz of DataChambers. "As we grow our services, it's great to know that by using Extreme Networks Open Fabric data center switches based on ExtremeXOS, we will always have next generation, highly scalable solutions to choose from. The Summit X770 is a highly promising new product with excellent scale for 10GbE, low latency and great features that will ensure the best Quality of Service for our customers.”

The Summit X770 scales for Big Data analytics applications where petabytes of data are stored and switched across the network. Extreme Networks Open Fabric data center solutions leverage standards-based technologies and SDN, preserving existing investments while bringing new innovations that drive more data, more flows and greater performance.

The Extreme Networks Open Fabric data center architecture incorporates standards-based OpenFlow technology to simplify network provisioning and supports Data Center Bridging (DCB) to provide consolidation of LAN and storage fabrics in the data center, including iSCSI.

The Summit X770 hardware also supports overlay tunneling technologies such as VXLAN and NVGRE to scale highly virtualized data center infrastructures. Additionally, ExtremeXOS will support AVB, 1588 PTP protocol, and SDN (OpenFlow/OpenStack) to deliver eased management of switches and integration with cloud services.

“The new Summit X770 40 GbE top of rack switch continues Extreme Networks’ history of innovation with a number of unique features in addition to scaling both physical and virtualized data center networking capabilities,” said Derek Granath, senior director of product line management for Extreme Networks. “Cross-platform stacking with our existing portfolio and leveraging our module ExtremeXOS, provides customers investment protection and seamless migration to higher speeds and port density.”