Large Canadian Territory Achieves Network Optimization for Almost a Decade and Counting

The Government of Northwest Territories (GNWT) in Northern Canada includes 33 communities, some of which are so remote they are only accessible by flight. Their 10-person Network IT department prides itself as being an early adopter and continuously explore leading edge technology. Since their initial purchase in 2000, the GNWT has been an Extreme Networks customer with solutions in over 500 buildings, including all government buildings, schools, and hospitals.

Challenges

• Increase agility and minimize network complexity for their widely dispersed communities
• Create separate virtualized networks running over the same infrastructure with ease
• Simplify network configuration and management for small IT team
• Enhance their resident experience with improved services

Extreme Solutions

• ExtremeAnalytics™
• ExtremeControl™
• Extreme Fabric Connect™
• ExtremeWireless™
• Extreme Management Center™

Results

Increased Efficiency

• Reduced manual configuration through dynamic VLANs and port assignments
• Network analytics enable faster troubleshooting while application traffic insight help determine ISP costs and budget planning
• Ease of turning up new infrastructure in remote communities has increased the IT team’s productivity

Enhanced User Experience

• Single pane of glass management enables NWT to quickly and efficiently find the root cause of any issues compared to the previous way of using multiple tools and logging into multiple devices
• Enhanced deployment of Drager patient monitoring application in hospital with Fabric-based multicast
• Public Wi-Fi services in hospital and museum

Reduced Risk

• Highly segmented network; government, schools, and hospitals all on their own separate, isolated virtual networks
• Network access control to authenticate users and devices and dynamically provision the correct policy on-demand
• Medical device hyper-segmentation within the hospital