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BlackDiamond and Summit Switches Shine in Comprehensive Data Center Testing of Active Active Fabric Architectures.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- April 29, 2013 -- Extreme Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: EXTR), today announced that the company's Open Fabric data center switching portfolio was tested and turned in remarkable results following the latest round of Lippis Report's evaluation of data center Ethernet switches and "Active-Active" cloud fabric technology.

Participants in the test included Extreme Networks, Arista, Brocade and Avaya. Extreme Networks' Open Fabric switches performed with the best overall latency of core modular and edge Top of Rack (ToR) swtiches and demonstrated resiliency with fast recovery times in three simulated failure scenarios — server link, T-o-R uplink and core. This is key to network operators seeking technology for cloud, disaster recovery and Internet exchange point designs that underpin data centers and converged storage systems with five nines reliability and impressive fault tolerance.

"Extreme Networks, having tested its data center solutions over the past two years, remains stubbornly consistent in delivering superior test results, be it capacity, latency, and now active active fabric configuration," said Nick Lippis, Lippis Reports. "The 2013 results set a high standard for performance and reliability."

"The Lippis Report tests demonstrate that Extreme's Open Fabric 10/40GbE switches offer one of the industry's fastest, most scalable and resilient data center Ethernet fabric solutions, providing investment protection and optimized TCO for their next generation data centers," said David Ginsburg, CMO for Extreme Networks.

Extreme Networks Active-Active results are based on standards-based Multi System Link Aggregation (M-LAG) technology, delivering both performance and interoperability with existing network deployments to preserve customers' prior investments in infrastructure and tools for fault management and network troubleshooting.

Test Highlights:

• Extreme Networks Open Fabric switches performed with the best overall latency and demonstrated resiliency with fast recovery times in three simulated failure scenarios — server link, ToR uplink and core.
• Extreme Networks Open Fabric demonstrated superior end-to-end latency of only 2.23 microseconds for server-to-server communications across two ToR switches and a core switch.
• Extreme Networks was the only vendor that demonstrated a simulated core switch failure, by shutting off power, allowing traffic to fail over entirely to the adjacent core switch nearly instantaneously with minimal packet loss.

Details of the tests: Vendors used differing technologies to provide active-active connections to the next hop in the network with both devices forwarding and receiving traffic simultaneously.