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By Extreme Networks

St. Johannes Hospital in Troisdorf-Sieglar, Germany, with just over 400 staff members, has more than 182 beds and treats approximately 8,800 inpatients and equally as many outpatients each year. The hospital introduced Gigabit Ethernet at the core and switched fast Ethernet at the edge in 1998 to support its Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) for digital medical imaging. The Hospital Information System (HIS) was looking to create a virtually paperless hospital operations chain. Ideally, the intent was to have all patient information processed and stored digitally and made available to its staff whenever and wherever needed. The latest goal in making the hospital completely digital was to introduce mobile rounds with the use of Wireless Ethernet and laptops at patients' bedsides. This capability would mean the availability of all relevant patient information at each patient's bedside with each bed check. At the same time, the new infrastructure solution would have to support the hospital's mission-critical life-saving applications, all of which are bandwidth-intensive.

By Extreme Networks and New Jersey Township

Middletown, New Jersey is a 42-square mile community located in Monmouth County, home to more than 67,000 people. The Township had many of its municipal buildings networked together, including its main administration building (which houses the police and court) as well as the Department of Public Works, three parks department buildings, and the Johnson Gill annex (which houses the tax and MIS departments). The network was facing constant and massive congestion problems with users often pulling down streaming videos. "œIt bogged things down, causing troublesome bottlenecks. We needed a more complete, leading-edge network foundation that would allow us to build an intelligent, segmented network", according to Todd Costello, IT Manager with the Township of Middletown.

By Extreme Networks and Marysville Schools

The Marysville Exempted Village School District is a growing school district located approximately 20 miles northwest of Columbus, Ohio. The district has over 5,000 students within its six elementary schools, one intermediate school, one middle school, and one high school. In mid-2007, it had an outdated and under-performing network that wasn't able to support some of the applications the schools planned to deploy, including Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and video streaming for on-demand educational presentations within the classrooms. There was also the need for fast Internet access. Not all Marysville Schools were on the same network, so the plan was to standardize on one infrastructure that could support Internet access, streaming video and a stable backbone for VoIP, as well as other educational and administrative applications that the faculty and staff needed.

Marysville Schools wanted a comprehensive wired and wireless solution, preferably from one vendor, and issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) to leading equipment providers. Placing priority on feature functionality, ease of use and management, and cost-effectiveness, Marysville Schools chose Extreme Networks and the Summit WM200 solution.

Data centers are the largest single IT investment CIOs and business leaders appropriate. Data center networking is leading edge by default and where high-speed links and new approaches are first deployed. While data centers are consolidating and becoming increasingly virtualized, networking requirements are fundamentally changing. High performance end-of-row and top-of-rack network switches are uniquely positioned to increase network throughput and reduce operational spend. I talk with Doug Murray VP/GM of Extreme Networks about new data center design options thanks to its Summit X650 high end Ethernet switch. If you're designing a data center network, then you need to listen to this podcast.

Scott Lucas, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing for Extreme Networks is my guest as we discuss Extreme Networks' major product portfolio expansion and the launch of its widget central. Extreme launched its new Summit X350 fixed configuration switch for network edge applications plus 802.11n access points and controllers. A new version of ExtremeXOS with enhanced automation capabilities to help IT leaders reduce operational spend is now available too. Extending the usefulness of its flagship BlackDiamond 8800, it launched the "œC" Series of core switch interface and management blades for increased scalability and density of 1GbE and 10GbE ports plus PoE support. Extreme has created an ecosystem around the development of application widgets by exposing features and providing software developers access to its ExtremeXOS. This ecosystem is called Widget Central. I talk with Scott about the new design options and widgets available to network architects afforded by this launch.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is always a difficult metric to measure. So many business and IT leaders focus on purchase price or product acquisition without giving full attention to operational and facilities cost, which dominate network TCO. Conventional wisdom is that for LAN and WLAN switching acquisition cost represents between 20 to 25% of TCO with operational and facilities spend representing between 75 to 80% over a 3-year period. So the question is what can IT leaders do to optimize TCO and bring balance to network acquisition and operations? Scott Lucas, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing for Extreme Networks is my guest as we discuss best practices to balance TCO.

By Extreme Networks

Wireless LANs have become pervasive in today's business environment. Mobile applications are driving innovations in wireless LAN technology as the exponential growth in users has put increasing demands on wireless bandwidth. This paper discusses the emerging 802.11n WLAN technology and suggests migration strategies for Enterprise customers.

By Extreme Networks

Extreme Networks® products have the features it takes to protect an enterprise network from the inside-out. This paper discusses the advanced security features that Extreme Networks builds into its switches and routers. Extreme Networks offers a rich portfolio of network infrastructure and security devices, ranging from 1U appliances to gigantic enterprise switches. Extreme Networks products provide connectivity, and protect converged networks from security threats using network access control, network segmentation and threat mitigation.