AGL Resources Inc.
Extreme Networks^® Powers the Network for Atlanta Energy Company
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AGL Resources Inc. is a regional energy holding company with operations in the Southeastern United States. Atlanta Gas Light Company, one of its subsidiaries, provides energy delivery services to more than 1.5 million customers in Georgia. Chattanooga Gas Company, another subsidiary, provides full natural gas service to customers in Tennessee. Although natural gas distribution is its core business, AGL Resources is also engaged in other energy-related businesses, including retail energy marketing, customer care services for energy marketers, and wholesale and retail propane sales.

Extreme Networks' Broadband Switching Solutions Enable Mission-Critical Applications
When AGL Resources was looking to boost its network power to support new bandwidth-intensive applications, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), web applications and imaging, the company turned to Extreme Networks.

After evaluating product offerings from top switching vendors, AGL Resources chose Extreme Networks for its high-performance, service-rich broadband switching solutions.

To meet AGL Resources' strict uptime and availability requirements for its mission-critical applications, including ERP, web applications, corporate backups, imaging and hefty file transfers, Extreme supplied the company with its Summit® fixed-configuration and BlackDiamond® core chassis switches.

"After the RFP process, it was clear that the right choice was Extreme Networks based on the superior technology of its products," said Greg Spence, Senior Network Engineer for AGL Resources Inc. "We needed a network with high availability, redundancy and resiliency to support our mission-critical applications and Extreme delivered ahead of the competition."

AGL Resources deployed Extreme BlackDiamond 6808 switches in the core of its network for full redundancy and in the wiring closet of the high traffic, three-building campus network. With ultra-high density Gigabit Ethernet and 10/100 Mbps ports, BlackDiamond switches offer wire-speed switching at Layer 2 and 3 with Policy-Based Quality of Service (QoS) and provide the company with carrier-class resiliency and fault tolerance.

Fifteen Extreme Summit48 switches are deployed in multiple remote offices with port counts up to 400. The non-blocking Summit48 switches deliver high-density 10/100 Mbps aggregation, wire-speed Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching with Policy-Based QoS.

ExtremeWare® Simplifies Network Management
AGL Resources is also utilizing Extreme Networks' ExtremeWare Enterprise Manager, an integrated application suite that makes it easy to configure, troubleshoot and monitor the status of switches, as well as deploy multi-vendor Policy-Based QoS to manage bandwidth and prioritize traffic.

ExtremeWare Enterprise Manager delivers a comprehensive set of network management tools that are easy to use from a Java-enabled web browser.

Features include:

• VLAN manager for the configuration and an overall view of network-wide VLANs
• Inventory manager for controlling inventory of managed devices
• Real-time statistics plot RMON data into a variety of graph and table formats for easy and precise reporting
• SmartTraps™ detect changes to switch configurations and automatically dispatch information to relevant databases and clients

"With Extreme's broadband switching solution, our network performance is significantly improved, management is simplified and more functional, and the density offered by Extreme's products allowed us to eliminate legacy cabling solutions," said Spence.

AGL Experiences a 30% Increase in Application Performance with Extreme
With Extreme supporting its data infrastructure, AGL Resources conducts faster backups and file transfers, and realizes improvements in application performance, including a new ERP application.

"Our application development groups run a great deal of bandwidth-intensive applications and are benefiting from the extra bandwidth the new infrastructure gives us," said Spence. " Backups finish in significantly less time, too. I benchmarked high-utilization applications before the upgrade and we are realizing about a 30% increase in speed in these activities with Extreme's solution."

Additionally, since the entire Extreme solution shares a consistent hardware, software and management architecture, the AGL Resources' network is easy to manage, scale and reconfigure quickly whenever necessary, reducing overall network ownership costs.

The Extreme Solution Will Grow With AGL
AGL Resources is poised to take full advantage of Extreme's broadband switching solutions well into the future. " We see the convergence of voice and data as a strategic direction for the market and Extreme's gear is capable of supporting it," said Spence. The company plans to continue working with Extreme for its ongoing infrastructure needs.

AGL Resources Network Diagram