From the earliest human settlements to the smart cities of tomorrow, the basic concept of the urban social fabric has always been about staying safe, connected, and productive. Let’s see how Extreme Fabric Connect provides all these benefits to the state and local governments alike!
The purpose of IT teams in modern cities is to connect devices, applications and people to enhance and streamline key municipal services such as transportation, parking, lighting or public safety for their citizens.
Unfortunately, this technological melting pot is highly dependent on the network infrastructure. And that dependence increases as more and more critical services, data, devices, and sensors are brought onto the network – demanding new levels of efficiency, performance, availability and security. It is a real issue that many municipal companies in Europe are currently struggling with.
“The metro system in Brussels is the lifeblood of the city. Without it, public life would grind to a standstill”, says Pierre-André Rulmont, VP, Information Systems at Brussels Intercommunal Transport Company (STIB). “Over the years, the metro lines have gradually reached the limits of what they can achieve in terms of capacity, efficiency and operability. This has brought us dangerously close to not being able to keep up with demand anymore”.
In order to help local government agencies like STIB meet those challenges and build a network foundation for smart city operations, Extreme Networks delivers a secure, flexible, and agile solution called Extreme Fabric Connect. Let’s take a look at some of its most important capabilities and how they translate into real-life examples!
Driving efficiencies and reducing costs
When you’re using public city transport, you usually want to go from point A to point B in the shortest possible time. The Fabric solution from Extreme is based on the Shortest Path Bridging technology, which basically follows the same principle and translates it into the organization of network traffic.
In the simplest terms, Extreme Fabric Connect creates an agile and automated network foundation that takes the complexity out of configuration. The technology enables administrators to create thousands of isolated, virtual service networks (VSNs) to run over a single physical network. These virtualized networks can be set up and changed very quickly with edge-only provisioning, eliminating instability and the risk of a human error.
Okay, but how about some concrete numbers?
- Just 1 protocol, instead of 4-6: Extreme Fabric Connect delivers the full breadth of L2/L3 networking services via a single protocol. The result is a dramatically simpler, single technology network, which is far easier to build, manage, and troubleshoot.
- 11x Faster Time to Service: since Extreme Fabric Connect only requires service changes at the edge of the network, it eliminates error-prone and time-consuming hop-by-hop configuration practices. The solution has been field proven to reduce operational costs by as much as 66%, while at the same time, increase time to service by 11x.
- Sub-second convergence for applications that require it, like video surveillance or VoIP: due to the elimination of overlay protocols, Extreme Fabric Connect users experience a vast improvement in average recovery times over conventional multi-protocol networks.
Extreme Fabric Connect is everywhere!
Speaking of customers – the solution has already helped thousands of local government agencies and municipal companies in Europe. One of the most vivid examples is the aforementioned Brussels Metro. Thanks to Extreme Fabric Connect, STIB now have the flexibility and agility to provision services, physically and logically, where they are needed for optimal efficiency. Today, the company holds a real-time, automated control of metro traffic, improving system uptime and freeing up IT resources to focus on creating new services.
Extreme Fabric Connect also supports smart video surveillance systems which usually require the right network infrastructure to ensure the scale, performance and quality of the video. In case of Brussels Metro, elimination of complex protocols enabled scalable IP multicast deployment of up to 15,000 high-definition cameras. Provisioning is required on only the ports attached to cameras and monitoring stations/and receivers – with no need to provision any core switches in between.
This not only reduces the risk of an outage due to human error during change but also allows the video surveillance network to be deployed faster and easier than ever before – with the ability to add, move and change cameras on the fly. Once the end points are provisioned, the network determines the shortest path from the sources (the cameras) to the destinations (monitoring stations) with optimized network path delivery, thus improving video delivery performance over traditional networked-based solution.
Read the full case study of Brussels Metro
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And if you happen to be in Brussels and get off the metro at the Munthof station, you will find yourself in front of the headquarters of FPS Justice, a Federal Public Service of Belgium. You guessed it – the organization uses Extreme Fabric Connect as well!
FPS Justice needed a modernized, scalable and stable network solution that would be ready for new technologies such as video conferencing, Voice over IP, NAC and other wireless applications. To that end, Extreme Fabric Connect provided a simplified, agile, and resilient infrastructure that makes network configuration and the deployment of new network devices and services much faster and easier for the local IT team.
“Thanks to Extreme, we have been able to meet this objective to improve information-sharing and offer new digital services. Our new network is truly a game changer for the way our justice system operates”, says Jimmy De Laet, ICT Infrastructure director at FPS Justice.
Read the full case study of FPS Justice
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Inherent network security
Continued investment in digitization and IoT has huge implications on security. As more devices connect to the network, the potential attack surface widens, and new security measures need to be considered. Extreme Fabric Connect addresses this issue in a truly elegant and effective way called the hyper-segmentation. After all, you don’t necessarily want all of those critical functions such as traffic control, smart grid applications, water management etc. to access the same portions of your network.
Okay, but how does this hyper-segmentation work and how is it different than a “regular” segmentation”?
As we mentioned earlier, Extreme Fabric Connect enables the creation of thousands of private virtual networks. Each of these VSNs is completely isolated without any IP reachability in or out (unless specified). This ability can extend across the network infrastructure (from point of ingress to point of egress), offering the ability to isolate traffic by different service types, applications or IoT devices. In the event a breach occurs, the vulnerability remains isolated within that segment, preventing potentially catastrophic lateral movements.
What’s more, with Fabric Connect, services extend and retract dynamically as corporate assets, IoT devices, and authorized users connect and disconnect. Network configuration profiles are removed from access edge switches and wireless access points as users/and devices disconnect from the network – reducing back door entry points and potential network vulnerabilities.
Our new network is truly a game changer for the way our justice system operates.
Jimmy De Laet, ICT Infrastructure Director, FPS Justice
Additionally, if you think about traditional, IP-based networks where we’re doing a lot of layer 3 IP hubs, we might be even micro-segmenting all those links one to another, so we have resiliency without having to fight Spanning Tree all the time. That’s great, but the problem is, the topology may be visible to a hacker. It means vulnerability to IP scanning techniques leading to topology discovery and lateral movements.
Sure, you can prevent some of that by being very careful with building ACLs but that’s very intensive and difficult manual labor, especially when you have around 30-40 switches on your network, with 20-30 connections each. In Fabric network, any hacker that gets into an IoT device that’s not fully secured can see entry point and exit point. But the great thing is, all the topology in the middle is completely obscured! There’s no IP to ping, no trace routes to do. This functionality is called stealth networking.