WHAT DOES
2020 LOOK LIKE
TO YOU?
CHANGE
HAPPENS. WE ALL KNOW THAT.
But what surprises us is how fast things change. We try to build agility into our organization. But we never seem to be agile enough. The pace of change itself has become a “Black Swan”: one of those “highly improbable” events that takes us by surprise and has such an outsized impact. At Extreme Networks, however, we find the pace of change exhilarating, a personal challenge, a gauntlet thrown down at our feet, which we eagerly pick up. Because when we are focused on creating the network of tomorrow, we want tomorrow to come as fast as it can – so that you can finally recognize just how far ahead of the wave you could have been.
SCENARIO: HELP DESK I’m on the help desk and the phone is ringing. It’s Katie in Accounting – her computer is “slow.” Let’s take a look. The portal shows me her complete network information: log in around 9am…granted access to accounting department
resources...laptop is connected to a desk-side port, which is connected to port 8 of switch 10 at Building B. That checks. So I click the “diagnose” button. The portal gives commands to the system, which gains access to her machine and sets up two different transmit/receive throughput tests.
The results are back…huh, that’s interesting: packet loss. I click on the “details” button: the loss is coming from the uplink between her desk and the core devices. But we’ve got redundant links…and the Extreme Networks Universal Port. So one click on
the Universal Port’s QoS tab gives a higher priority to the ports of Katie and her accounting colleagues. Re-run the tests…and voila! zero packet loss for her connection. I never had to leave my desk.
HOW DO YOU SPEND We create about 5 exabytes of data every two days in 2010. That’s equivalent to all the information created from the beginning of mankind…through 2003.1
YOUR TIME? Are you continually putting out brush fires? Playing catch-up? Trying to upgrade your network to support emerging technologies before they overwhelm you? If you’re so busy “catching up with the present,” how do you plan for the future? How do you develop strategies for leveraging
In January 2004, there were 188,000 English-language articles on Wikipedia. In September 2010, there were more than 3,428,000 – an increase of nearly 18-fold.2
In August 2008, there were 100 million people on Facebook. In July 2010, there were 500 million people – that’s 1 out of every 7 people on earth… who have more than $2/day to live on.3
social networking
virtualization mobility cloud computing
when you are fully immersed in present-day tactics? Or is “future-ready” just a Buzzword Bingo term at your place? At Extreme Networks, we have a history of vision that has been distinctively innovative. Expanding the use of Ethernet outside of the LAN to get greater benefit from its performance and simplicity. Developing open solutions that let network managers tailor their networks for greater flexibility and cost-efficiency. Providing a single, uniform operating system that helps you get the most out of multi-vendor networks. We don’t focus on short-term, incremental improvements. We take the long view – and we provide our customers with the scalable and extensible solutions that let them look securely to the future, as well as help them optimize their present-day operations.
As long as we think of a network as something that delivers applications, connectivity and services, we stay trapped in that present-day tactical mindset that keeps us from thinking clearly about the future.
WHEN IS A NETWORK
MORE THAN
INFRASTRUCTURE?
So let’s look at the network differently. For instance, if you wanted your network to serve as a business process change-agent, what would it need to do? Let’s say you want your sales reps to respond to customer inquiries…immediately, no matter where they are. What has to happen? Well, you need a network that recognizes devices and serves applications appropriately, so that customer history is easily readable and accessible during the call. The sales rep should be able to link in subject matter experts. Voice and data communications have to retain appropriate security. And that’s just one simple business process. What about something more complex? Like enabling untapped strategic opportunities that will deliver distinctive competitive advantages? We’re all for increasing productivity and reducing costs. They are noble objectives…but short-sighted. Once you start thinking of what your network could do for you, you may be disappointed with what you’ve got now. That’s where Extreme Networks comes in.
SCENARIO: VIRTUAL MACHINES I’ve got a design to finish – but it hinges on the results of a simulation that’s running slow. So I log onto the internal Web portal. The network knows who I am. It knows my clearance. It lets me move my simulation’s virtual machine to a
higher-performance server…which the network automatically provisions…so I can accelerate the simulation speed. And with complete security and reliability: all the network configurations – e.g., VLAN, QoS, ACLs, rate limiting – instantly followed my VM as it moved.
Which comes in handy, because I need to get to that meeting across campus. I grab my iPad so I can check on the sim’s status while I’m out. The network still knows who I am and now it recognizes my iPad, even at a different location, and allows me direct access to the portal – where
I can see that the virtual move has cut hours off my simulation time. It’s done already, so I leave the meeting to go finish the design – and get home at a decent hour for a change.
SCENARIO: WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY I do scientific research. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I like it…except when the network bogs down in the middle of a global-collaboration session. But the company upgraded the network,
with more muscular links to my new server farm: 40GbE at the core and 10GbE connected to every server. Get this: we can now access our NAS storage at speeds faster than the local disks. Does it make a difference? I already think in “real time.” Now, my experiments can keep pace.
I watch scenario results appear in seconds that could have taken weeks before. So what’s the practical difference? How about cutting time-tomarket by months, maybe years, on what comes out of my latest project? And the folks in the executive suite? The global strategies they can
develop, now that the global workplace works as fast as the local campus, are giving us some serious competitive advantages. Now they tell me that the new network can easily scale to 100GbE. I’m getting whiplash just thinking about it.
IT’S TIME THAT
NETWORK
PERFORMANCE
WAS REDEFINED. Imagine a network that was aware of its world. Imagine that it knew every individual user – their needs and preferences and access status. Their location…the device they were on. And then acted like a network “valet,” serving them up EXACTLY what they need… where they need it…the way they need it.
While supercomputers are on the verge of achieving the capacity of the human brain, personal computers will provide the equivalence of the human brain by about 2020.4
This is a very different sort of network performance. It’s the performance demanded by forward-looking companies. And it’s what you get from our “Aware Network”… which is uniquely aware of user…device… location…application, and is able to dynamically align network resources and accurately apply network performance, to best support each user’s unique business needs…from moment to moment, in real time. This changes the way you work, no matter what your network does for you.
Today the challenge of mobility is accommodating the eruption and diversity of connected devices. In 2020, the challenge – and opportunity – will be the lack of devices as the human body becomes its own node on the network.5
For the enterprise, users are unleashed to work at their fullest capacity, while maintenance and troubleshooting is simplified. In the data center, the accelerating mobility of virtualization is under more intelligent and secure control. For the service provider, the burdens of infrastructure management are reduced, allowing you to focus on enhancing subscriber services. In short, an “Aware Network” with “Applied Performance” heightens the performance that really counts – that of the users of your network.
WHAT ARE YOUR
REASONS
FOR SAYING NO? You live in a “no one was ever fired for buying -----” world. So if one of your reasons for not taking our sales rep’s call is that we’re not the “industry leader,” we understand where you’re coming from. But let’s flip that thinking on its head. A lot of Extreme Networks customers choose us specifically for what we are and the way we work with them. We don’t lock them into proprietary technology. We don’t dictate prices or product options. We don’t force a new round of massive capital investment every time we add a capability. But perhaps you’re not that locked into one vendor. Perhaps you have a complex multi-vendor environment and you simply don’t want to add another vendor to the mix… in which case you will miss out on the benefits of Extreme Network’s solutions – particularly how adept we are at handling multi-vendor environments. We can continue debunking reasons for saying “no,” but you get the idea. So, you can make the “safe” choice – or you can make a savvier choice. It’s your call.
SCENARIO: PROCESS ADOPTION It’s hot here in Bangalore – on a number of levels. That’s why I moved here from London: to get closer to new markets in South Asia. This venture feels like pioneering…especially since my “streamlined workforce” has to work in entirely
different ways. Sure, we used to off-shore, but all the core operations were local. Now I AM offshore. So I’ve got nothing but virtual project teams – in every department. You got any idea what a headache that can be? I’ve practically got more levels of security
clearance to manage than I do employees. And my employees are really feeling out of place: they’re not used to working with colleagues they’ve never met and never seen, and who change constantly. But the network that comes with this new office – it handles it. It manages
access levels so my people don’t have to. It’s wicked fast so data, graphics and video flow between workers all across the globe…as if they were across the street. And my people? – they’re starting to feel right at home.
SCENARIO: SERVICE-PROVIDER BUSINESS AGILITY Provisioning is getting crazier all the time. I’ve got customers coming at me from every direction. They want to do things they’ve never done before – because that’s what yields
competitive advantage. Here’s a pharmaceutical company that’s planned a worldwide press conference to announce some new breakthrough; they want 10gig of bandwidth...tomorrow morning. Here’s a data center that wants to expand its virtualization program for greater immediacy. Here’s an energy company with a
deep-sea drilling venture and they need to blast data from their rig up to NASA’s computing cloud to get the coordinates for where to sink their drill bit. And that’s just in the last hour. But my network’s got it all covered. Which freed up my programmers to write code that can add
10gig at the snap of a finger. If a lot of these requests get provisioned at once, the network IDs where the spike is coming from and applies dynamic QoS rules to prioritize the flow. Bottom line: quicker provisioning means quicker revenue – and happier customers.
SO, WHAT DOES
2020 LOOK LIKE TO YOU?
Work-life integration will now be a network application. For instance, if an admin puts an early-morning conference call on your calendar late the night before, your wake-up alarm will automatically reset to get you up at an earlier time.6
You don’t need to have an answer…yet. But there is no question that we’re in a headlong rush into the future…and you don’t want a network that can’t keep up. So if words like “scalable” and “extensible” and “convergence” keep cropping up in strategic conversations, and you would prefer that the phrases “price tag” and “our network can’t do that” weren’t prominent among them, we should talk.
Don’t look now, but Moore’s Law says we will have 32 TIMES the computing power in 2020 that we have in 2010. Can you say “exponential increase”? We, literally, cannot imagine what that means for how we will work.7
Corporate and North America Extreme Networks 3585 Monroe Street Santa Clara, CA 95051 United States Phone +1 408 579 2800
Europe, Middle East, Africa and South America Extreme Networks Kernkade 2, 2nd floor Lage Weide, Utrecht 3542 CH The Netherlands Phone +31 30 800 5100 extremenetworks.com
3 4 5 6 7 1 2
Asia Pacific Extreme Networks 541 Orchard Road #15-03 Liat Towers Singapore 238881 Phone +65 6836 5437
Japan Extreme Networks 15F Sumitomo Korakuen Building 1-4-1 Koishikawa Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112-002 Japan Phone +81 3 5842 4011
email: info@extremenetworks.com
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, at Techonomy conference, 4 Aug 2010 Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia. Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#History. Bob Geldof, musician and social activist, in speech at the 2009 Infosys Confluence EMEA conference The US Census Bureau’s World POPClock Projection Ray Kurzweil, futurist and author Mark Rolston, Chief Creative Officer of Frog Design, writing in Forbes.com, 8 April 2010 Quentin Hardy, journalist, writing in Forbes.com, 8 April 2010 Martin Ford, author and software developer, writing in Forbes.com, 8 April 2010
Š 2010 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Extreme Networks, the Extreme Networks logo, are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Extreme Networks, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the trademarks of their respective owners. Specifications are subject to change without notice. 2020_01 10/10