The Value of Extending Fabric Connect to Your Remote Offices

Extreme Networks’ Fabric Connect technology is redefining networking to match the speed of today’s digital era. Long wait times required for network additions or changes and the rigid design constraints of legacy networks have made it challenging for network IT teams to move at the speed of the business. Fabric Connect eliminates these delays and enables our customers to deploy networks that are far more agile; enabling rapid application deployment and seamless services provisioning - while also improving the reliability, stability and security of the network.

The power of our Fabric Connect technology can be natively extended beyond the traditional Data Center or Campus to any remote or branch locations connected by a WAN service. By extending Fabric Connect natively to the branch, a single technology and operational model can be leveraged end to end, decreasing training requirements and simplifying operations. The purpose of this document is to articulate the top ten values of extending Fabric Connect into your remote or branch offices.

How Fabric Connect Extends to Your Distributed Locations: Fabric Extend

Fabric Extend enables the extension of native Fabric Connect services to your remote branch locations over public or private WAN services. Fabric Extend utilizes VXLAN tunnels to extend Fabric Connect over a private IP based WAN service or can leverage IPSec encrypted tunnels to traverse public networks, like the Internet, for primary or backup WAN services. In this deployment scenario, the Fabric Connect technology is deployed as an overlay technology. This ability to work as an underlay as well as an overlay, leveraging Fabric Extend, is one of the unique characteristics of this technology. As an overlay, because the fabric services are agnostic to the service provider connectivity service, that service can be swapped very easily if it becomes too expensive or the SLA is not what was promised.

In addition to interconnecting distributed sites back to the main campus and data center, Fabric Extend can also be leveraged for Data Center interconnect or for connecting fabric islands over an IP infrastructure.

The Top 10 Values of Extending Fabric Connect to the Branch Office

These are the reasons to seamlessly extend Fabric Connect to your distributed branch office locations:

1. Rapid time to service for new services/network changes across the distributed network
2. Single pane of glass management
3. Zero-touch on-boarding of branch infrastructure
4. Simple multi-tenancy and micro-segmentation across the distributed network
5. Simplification by reducing distributed firewalls
6. Dynamic auto-attach to simplify and secure branch office provisioning
7. Resilient branch office connectivity Fabric
8. Public and private WAN infrastructure connectivity options
9. Integrated Application Hosting to reduce disparate devices
10. Simple multicast extension