Tussa Kraft AS was founded in 1949 and ever since has been producing and supplying electricity to Sunnmøre, a district in the south west of Møre and Romsdal county in Norway. The company played an active role in the far reaching changes that have had a major impact on the region’s general industrialization. Tussa IKT manages Tussa’s investments in regional IP network infrastructure, built using wireless technologies, xDSL, ADSL2+ and optical fibers. Tussa IKT also provides advanced IT services to both companies and public organizations’ in the region.

2019 was a very special year for Tussa, as the company was celebrating its 70th anniversary. Around that time, the company also embarked on a major upgrade of the network structure that was intended to provide residents and businesses of Sunnmøre with Internet, TV and IT services. The old network had already been showing clear signs of becoming maintenance-heavy, thus reducing service quality and company spending.

– It was becoming increasingly challenging to conduct regular maintenance work. Daily operations such as establishing, configuring, verifying and troubleshooting VLAN were complicated, due to many switch rows that had to be changed manually – says Ivar Driveklepp, CEO of Tussa IKT.

We all know this story only too well: too many manual processes, and – as luck would have it – all of them being a significant failure vector for the networks. As the complexity increased, the people of Tussa IKT noticed that the risk of making an error rose exponentially.

Tussa IKT was convinced that they needed a much better way to operate large networks. And so, a call for tender was issued. – The reason why we wanted to replace the old core network lied in the challenges we had been facing, as well as the need for increased capacity due to the network traffic increase in the future – says Driveklepp. – At the beginning, we were expecting to go for MPLS to meet the future challenges. It was not until the tender round we heard about Extreme Networks’ Fabric Connect – he adds.

The introduction of the Fabric Connect made the acquisition of a new core network a little bit different from what Tussa IKT had envisaged in the first place when they went out with the tender. Although, with the implementation of this new technology, the benefits quickly became visible. – Easier maintenance work, more capacity, greater opportunities for automatic redundancy through mesh and ring structures, fewer error situations – says Ivar Driveklepp.

Fabric Connect from Extreme Networks constitutes a new way of designing and building networks. Many manual steps, typical for the existing network technologies, are simply dispensable due to the virtualization of several parts of the network. This means definitely less need for physical changes, higher network redundancy and much easier administration.

What used to be an alphabet soup of abbreviations, protocols piled up on other protocols, was eventually replaced with far more elegant solution. Fabric Connect is based on an open industry standard called Shortest Path Bridging (SPB). One of the unique things about SPB is simplification. All complex protocols were removed and replaced with one, simple protocol. This makes it much easier to design, build, and establish new services and operate the network.

So where does Tussa IKT stand with its network at the moment? – We are still in an implementation phase for a new core network, but we can already see that establishing services is much less time-consuming and can be done with less risk – says Driveklepp. The delivery of Extreme Networks Fabric Connect from Data Equipment has also reduced costs for Tussa IKT. There are two reasons for this. – Less work and less expensive equipment – says the CEO of Tussa IKT, before adding one slightly more abstract factor - and less complexity. The collaboration with Extreme’s Platinum Partner, Data Equipment, who provided technical advice and transfer of expertise, has been great as well.

Data Equipment has a long experience in designing and implementing advanced security and network solutions. The company has set out to become Norway's leading supplier of cost-effective and timely solutions for security and data communication. Data Equipment’s expertise and product portfolio includes both LAN and WLAN, next generation security and infrastructure management and analysis solutions, as well as advanced endpoint solutions.

Data Equipment is a Platinum Partner for Extreme Networks.