Extreme Networks has announced that colocation provider Profitability.net has chosen its virtualized 10 Gigabit data center, cloud and storage networking solutions based on its 4 Pillar Data Center strategy, as it rolls out its Appica.com cloud service.

Profitability.net provides data center, hosted application, and cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services for 450+ emerging to Fortune 1000 companies. Profitablity.net is launching Appica.com to provide public and private cloud servers and storage. With Appica.com, customers can eliminate costly virtualization projects and simply add and remove servers and storage as needed. Purchasing cloud services enables customers to become profitable earlier in the business lifecycle, enabling them to choose only as much network and storage capacity as they need, rather than under-provisioning or overspending on servers to support their users.

Extreme Networks' solution to scale and simplify the data center architectures by reducing network tiers and its network-based solutions to address Virtual Machine (VM) lifecycle management were crucial in establishing and rolling out Profitability.net's cloud based storage and data services.

"While time to market and total cost of ownership were top priorities in our network procurement process, we truly benefitted from Extreme Networks expertise in dealing with virtualization and creating a highly available data center and cloud architecture," said Aaron Larkins, CEO for Profitability.net. "In order to scale our high availability cloud service offering, we needed Extreme Networks Summit X650 with its sophisticated virtualization capabilities, 10 Gigabit copper and high performance stacking."

To assist the performance and uptime of Appica.com cloud services, Extreme Networks developed a customized network solution and data center migration plan based on its 4 Pillar Data Center strategy for transitioning to a highly virtualized data center while simplifying the network.

The migration strategy includes Extreme Networks scalable Ethernet switching platforms and its XNV virtualization lifecycle management solution, providing multivendor support of leading server virtualization platforms to provide visibility, control and automated management of VMs. This next generation data center architecture accommodates Profitability.net's evolving technology landscape, supporting integrated SAN storage, and server virtualization.

"Supporting Profitabilty.net's virtualized data center and cloud platform requires a well planned architecture that gives visibility and control to VMs while scaling and simplifying the network with reduced tiers," said Shehzad Merchant, senior director of strategy for Extreme Networks. "The Appica.com cloud service takes advantage of this strategy and is well positioned to serve demanding customers."

Extreme Networks data center solution is highlighted by the Summit X650 Top-of-Rack switches throughout Profitability.net's server racks, providing high performance, copper-based 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to attach iSCSI-based Storage Area Network (SAN). Additionally, stacked Summit X450 switches provide Gigabit server aggregation and increased levels of fault tolerance. For added flexibility and cost savings, Extreme Networks' SummitStack stacking technology manages up to eight switches as a single logical unit.