In our hyper-connected world, having stable, reliable network access is regarded as a given, and the consequences of not having it are only getting more severe. According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. But because there are so many differences in how businesses operate, at the low end, this can equate to $140,000 per hour, $300,000 per hour on average, and as much as $540,000 per hour at the higher end.

Having a resilient, self-healing, and not to mention current, network infrastructure can help avoid these costs.  Extreme’s Fabric Connect technology, which is based on the IEEE/ IETF standard Shortest Path Bridging, makes networks more flexible, more resilient, and more secure.  It eliminates the need for protocol overlays and simplifies the network by using just a single control plane for all the network’s routing, switching, multicast, and VPN requirements.  This represents a fundamental difference with this technology in comparison to other next-generation networking solutions and it has a profound impact on the deployment, management, and security of the network. 

In fact, Fabric Connect improves the stability and resiliency of the network infrastructure in the following key ways:

• Provides a completely load balanced, active network.
• Eliminates the domino effect of protocol overlays, delivering full network recovery in milliseconds (L2/3, even multicast) so that upper layer communications protocols are unaffected.
• Supports seamless failover to a back-up path as well as seamless restoration back to the primary path multiple times in the event of a link/ node failure without the flapping or instability that can occur in traditional routed networks.
• Eliminates network touch points through network services automation.   Aggregation and core nodes are built out once and then rarely touched, improving the overall stability of the network and accelerating the pace of moves, adds, and changes.
• Supports fast and seamless failover between geographically-dispersed sites to help protect against the threat of a natural disaster.

Can this improvement in stability and resiliency be measured? Yes – and it has been.  In the whitepaper, Fabric Connect a Quiet Revolution, third-party research company Dynamic Markets surveyed customers on failover time before and after their deployment of Fabric Connect.  Before, the average failover time was 14 mins – while after was just 320 milliseconds.  That’s a 2500X improvement!  Furthermore, outages due to human error went from three per year to zero.

Seeing is Believing

In this video, Distinguished Principal Engineer, Ed Koehler with Sales Enablement & Media Strategist Erika Bagby, walking through a demo that showcases the self-healing characteristics of our Fabric Connect technology.