Extreme Bolsters SDN Play with Partnerships, Products

Expanding on its software-defined networking (SDN) strategy announced earlier this year, Extreme Networks (EXTR) has built an ecosystem of technology vendors and developed two more pieces of its SDN hardware stable.

“We believe we are the industry’s first standards-based, comprehensive and open data center solution,” said Dan Dulac, vice president of Solution Strategy at Extreme, in an interview with The VAR Guy. The latest announcements, he said, serve to prove that.

The company has announced two additions to its Software Defined Architecture, the Summit X670-G2 switch and the Purview Application Sensor, both designed according to the OpenDaylight SDN standard. The Summit X670 is a top-of-rack switch available in 48- and 72-port, 1RU, 10GbE fixed models, while the Purview Application Sensor is an appliance that extends the view and management capabilities of Extreme’s Purview analytics technology deeper into data centers.

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Extreme also noted the development of a formal Technology Solution Partner (TSP) program, created to ensure its SDN architecture plays well with technologies spanning all ranks of IT, from mobility and security to data center and storage. Extreme has been working with vendors to ensure interoperability since it announced its Software Defined Architecture, and this is simply a formalization of a program.

The latest additions to the TSP are Sanbolic, Netoptics Ixia and A10 Networks.

“We want to give partners and customers maximum flexibility to implement unique solutions to meet customers’ needs,” Dulac said. “So we are building a comprehensive ecosystem of class-leading technology partners.”

Extreme’s moves show the company is making good on its desire to build a standards-based yet open architecture that embraces all points of the network. To that end, Extreme also recently began supporting Microsoft Hyper-V, and now supports all three major virtualization technologies, Dulac noted.

“Everyone is talking about SDN and customers are making purchase decisions because they want to make sure their investments are protected in the future,” he said. “In some cases some vendors are struggling. We think the challenge with the vendors is they have a huge installed base and have to be careful not to cannibalize that, as SDN opens the door to other vendors.

“We believe if you’re one of the top 5 networking vendors you have a lot of market share and have a lot to lose,” he added. “You don’t want to cannibalize what you have in the market. With that in mind, we have much more to gain than the bigger guys.”

However, he said, channel partners must be mindful of trying to sell SDN wholesale to their new and existing customer base. “SDN is big and broad. The channel needs to attack it in chunks.” Ideally, he said, that involves selling solutions without selling infrastructure.

“What will push SDN into the mainstream is use cases—comparing what companies are doing today to what SDN can do to solve a problem. With those, partners can move in and show solutions using SDN to address those pain points,” he said.

Find a need and solve the problem: that’s where partners will succeed with SDN.