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Extreme Networks Fabric – An Engineers View…

I’ve spent 15 years working in an NHS trust as a network engineer. NHS networks are complex, they are constantly changing and new services are continually being provisioned. Fabric is one of those technologies that can genuinely and tangibly make the life of a network engineer infinitely less stressful!

Consider a real-world example involving a piece of mobile medical equipment in a hospital. This equipment needs to be plugged into different wall ports around the site, requiring all potential ports to be configured with the correct VLAN and that VLAN to be egressed to the access layer. To complicate matters, if the port needs to be repurposed for a different device, the VLAN configuration must be changed again. Traditionally, this process demands multiple manual changes by an engineer to ensure the end user can continue working seamlessly. It’s a repeated manual process, it’s time consuming and it’s inherently susceptible to misconfiguration and subsequent network issues.

Here’s where fabric architecture shines… With fabric, this entire process can be automated using policy-based services. The fabric can instantly recognize the medical equipment and automatically egress the VLAN through the network, providing that device with the specific services it needs. When the device is removed, the VLAN is also removed, and if it’s no longer needed on the access layer switch, it will be pruned back to the core, service provisioning that is both secure and elastic.

Medical devices, IOT, Shadow IT, BYOD – lots of buzz words that make a network engineer’s life immeasurably stressful. Fabric is one of those rare technologies that can bring order to chaos, can provide peace of mind that different device groups can be provisioned across a large network, dynamically, seamlessly and securely. Any technology that removes the need to manually configure new services across a large-scale network, in a world where the vast majority of network outages are caused by configuration changes, is a winner in my book…

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