Saving Time and Reducing Costs Through Automation with Network Fabric

Time is a critical asset for organizations in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. Inefficiencies, delays, and downtime can lead to high direct and indirect costs, straining operational capabilities and budgets. The ability to swiftly adapt to changing demands and maintain seamless operations is essential for staying competitive. To do so, your organization needs a strong network infrastructure that limits downtime, runs efficiently, and can scale to meet changing demands.

One of the main concerns for IT departments in supporting these operations is network management. Since legacy networks were designed for a different technological landscape, managing them today is often a road paved with setbacks and challenges. For instance, many IT teams grapple with monitoring performance and security across diverse environments, including on-premises networks, cloud infrastructures, and hybrid architectures. With manual configurations accompanying every single move, add, or change, deploying new devices and provisioning services is more complex and inefficient than ever, creating therisk that human error could lead to network failures or breaches.

Utilizing modern, scalable, and automated network architectures is critical for businesses to remain competitive and resilient in today's fast-evolving digital environment. Extreme Fabric, the industry’s most widely deployed fabric solution, helps address these demands of modern IT teams, and combining it with the ExtremeCloud IQ Site Engine solution can further simplify and streamline IT operations.

How does automation in network fabric work?

Network fabric represents the web of connections between network devices such as Wi-Fi access points, switches, and routers, enabling the transportation of data to its destination. While fabric can describe the physical wiring that forms these connections, it more commonly refers to a virtualized, automated overlay of connections that runs atop the physical topology, streamlining data flow and network management.

What distinguishes Extreme Fabric from similar solutions is its adherence to open standards (IEEE 802.1aq), which facilitates interoperability with a wide range of systems and eliminates the complex design constraints of traditional networks. Network administrators gain the freedom to build and deliver services on demand—wherever and whenever they are needed.

With Extreme Fabric, the flexibility and streamlined approach to designing, managing, and troubleshooting networks is further amplified by unique, built-in automation features that reduce manual configuration efforts, enable faster service rollouts, and minimize the risk of human errors:

• Zero-Touch Provisioning: Services can be rapidly deployed and adjusted through automation, allowing the network to adapt swiftly to organizational changes and demands. This flexibility not only supports business agility and responsiveness but also minimizes potential errors and increases network resiliency.
• Autosensing of Devices: The network supports plug-and-play installations, allowing new network devices to be added without manual configuration, thereby reducing setup times and potential errors.
• Fabric Attach: This feature automates the connection of non-fabric devices to the fabric network, simplifying the integration of endpoints such as Wi-Fi access points and IP cameras. It helps ensure that devices are correctly configured and securely connected.
• Microsegmentation: Multiple, isolated virtual networks can be deployed quickly over a single physical infrastructure, enhancing security by preventing unauthorized access between segments.

What does it all mean in practice?

With Extreme Fabric, new services or service changes can be easily configured at the network edge only, removing the need for complex, error-prone, and time-consuming network-wide, hop-by-hop configurations. Faster implementation of services means reduced operational delays. Since there’s no requirement to modify core or aggregation nodes, maintenance windows are significantly reduced or even entirely eliminated, and time-to-service efficiency can be increased. By decreasing the extent of manual interventions and streamlining network management processes, organizations can cut down their operations costs by as much as 66%.