ACADEMIA

Extreme Networks announced a joint marketing agreement where they will work together to provide fast, secure, multi-tenant cloud networks for today's large enterprises and cloud service providers. The solutions are being demonstrated at Extreme Networks' Interop tradeshow booth #1851 in Las Vegas, May 8-10.

The main concerns organizations have with shifting their data and networking to private, public or hybrid clouds are security, latency and scalability. But network architects are slowly beginning to see the economic value of pushing more applications to the cloud. When new products become available that are scalable and won't impact network performance, Extreme Networks believes cloud adoption will expand.

"The data center networking equipment market segment that supports private, public and hybrid clouds continues to enjoy strong growth," said Sam Barnett, directing analyst for Data Center & Cloud at Infonetics Research. "We predict that the market for this type of DC Networking Equipment will reach $11.6B in 2015."

Extreme Networks Ethernet switching and Fortinet's FortiGate Unified Threat Management (UTM) security appliances have been recognized by Info-Tech Research, the Lippis Report and BreakingPoint Systems, Inc. as performance innovators in network switching and security.

Extreme Networks switches feature dense 10/40GbE with 20 terabits of capacity and Fortinet's top-of-the-line FortiGate-5140B chassis has been tested by Fortinet at 559Gbps of firewall throughput and up to 132 million concurrent sessions. To put that performance in context, according to Fortinet, the chassis can inspect 10,000 iTunes songs every second or 36 million songs per hour, 228,000 Web pages every second or 821 million pages per hour. Together, the two companies' products offer the performance and scalability required to support today's cloud infrastructures.

The two companies recently completed interoperability testing that evaluated switch and security functionality with integrated firewall, VPN, IPS, Web filtering and application control services.

"As the demand for Cloud infrastructure and services increases, so does the expectation that those solutions will be stable, secure and proven," said Bill Annino, vice president of data technologies at Carousel Industries, a reseller of both Extreme Networks and Fortinet's products. "To meet this challenge, Extreme Networks and Fortinet have come together with their products to offer the combination of performance and security protection that enables us to deliver a complete solution to our customers."

"The toughest part of securing the cloud today is doing so without affecting network performance," said Greg Fitzgerald, vice president of global marketing at Fortinet. "You can buy multiple appliances in an attempt to cover all of today's threat vectors, but at a point, management and costs become unwieldy and you're going to take a hit in performance. Consolidating all security functions into a purpose built, high performance security device that's managed through a simple interface and coupling that with a switch from Extreme Networks, offers today's cloud service providers a very powerful one-two punch."

"The business case for the cloud comes down to cost, scale and security," said David Ginsburg, chief marketing officer for Extreme Networks. "Our work with Fortinet addresses each of these concerns by providing combined scalability, performance and intelligence, allowing enterprises to more confidently choose robust and interoperability tested solutions within budget."