Burbank, California Turns to Extreme Networks^® for High-Performance Switch Infrastructure Solution
City Rich in Media and Entertainment Needs High-Performance, High-Reliability Infrastructure-
Extreme Networks Delivers
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The city of Burbank, with over 100,000 residents, is a prominent media and entertainment-oriented city which prides itself on a high quality of life, combining 21st century technology with small-town feel. Burbank is home to several entertainment giants, including Warner Brothers Pictures, Warner Music Group, Walt Disney Studios, and NBC Studios. It is a city of people, pride, and progress: these three ingredients turned a tiny, rural town into the thriving community it is today.

A Customer Challenge
In 2003, the city of Burbank was dealing with an antiquated network that had been built over time with a mix of equipment from various vendors. The city's 1,400 employees regularly faced latency issues and connection time-outs, and the infrastructure was overburdened and unreliable. The information technology department, responsible for supporting 14 departments within the city, evaluated solutions from two top switch vendors, including Extreme Networks, and put highest priority on price for performance, reliability, ease of use, and hardware scalability. Extreme Networks was the clear winner and Burbank embarked on a total infrastructure overhaul with the company.

The Solution
Extreme Networks provided Burbank with its award-winning Alpine® switches for the central network core as well as the city's bigger buildings, and Summit® switches for smaller facilities and closets. The switches are connected via fiber optic cable at 1 gigabit, and the Alpine switches have redundant links between them, for an aggregate total of 2 gigabits between each. Summit switches power the city's high-speed Storage Area Network, which is used for backups. Finally, Extreme's EPICenter® management suite helps the city easily configure and troubleshoot the network, make changes to Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs), and generate comprehensive status reports.

"The Network Operations group, which is very small—only three help desk and five network employees—is the single biggest winner since we've deployed Extreme Networks," said Perry Jarvis, Network Operations Manager for the city of Burbank. "It's made our jobs so much easier, we get so few network-related calls, and we see the status of the infrastructure 24x7, so we can catch problems before they even happen. And the wireless WAN integrated seamlessly with the Extreme Networks LAN. It was a perfect fit."

The Results
Dramatically Improved Performance
Within each Summit and Alpine switch (as well as Extreme Networks BlackDiamond® switches) is a non-blocking switch fabric that provides full wire-speed Layer 3 and Layer 2 performance all the time. In each instance, the backplane capacity is greater than the aggregation of all its ports, so data is not lost-even when the network load requires all ports to deliver full gigabit bandwidth.

"Prior to deploying the Extreme Networks solution, we had to deal with backup times of 48 hours and up," said Jarvis. "With the Extreme Networks gear in place, that has dramatically improved, now it takes just a few hours."

Extreme Networks Layer 3 VLAN capabilities further enhance network performance for the city because traffic can be separated by department and function, with each VLAN assigned a specific bandwidth threshold. The use of VLANs also ensures the integrity and isolation of traffic between different departments by creating logical barriers that keep unauthorized users from accessing confidential data and protects the corporate network from unsafe traffic. For instance, citizens using computers in the library are only given access to the public VLAN, as opposed to being allowed onto the city VLAN, which is utilized by library personnel. This ensures classified data is kept confidential and prevents any malicious code possibly downloaded by citizens from infecting the corporate network.

Enhanced Reliability
The fault-tolerance and redundancy built into award-winning switches from Extreme Networks allow the city to enjoy maximum uptime and the key role in helping the city add redundancy to its Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition network. This network, an OC-3 fiber ring around the city, helps personnel monitor the electrical system for the city's power grid. Therefore, it is critical that the network remain up and running 24x7 because if part of the city were to lose power without Burbank staff knowing, it would become a huge safety and security concern. With Extreme Networks, the city is assured high reliability for this crucial task.

"We've had great success with the real-time monitoring of the power grid due to the excellent quality of the Extreme switches," said Jarvis.

Extreme Networks has replicated key components of its switches, including power supplies, to ensure continued operation if a component fails. In addition, switch modules are hot swappable, which means replacements can be made without rebooting or resetting the switch. The replacement of one module does not affect the operation of any other module, so the network continues to operate even if a switch component fails or when configuration changes are made.

"Reliability is a big issue for the city and has been problematic in the past," said Jarvis. "For example, Burbank Water and Power uses a connection-oriented application that was experiencing many time-out related problems. Once we moved applications and data to the Extreme Networks switches, those problems were gone."

Ease of Use Lowers Total Cost of Ownership
By sharing a common operating system and management platform between Extreme Networks switches, Extreme products offer end-to-end simplicity and ease of management for Burbank, resulting in a lower Total Cost of Ownership. The city utilizes Extreme Networks EPICenter management suite for a global view and centralized management of the network, which further simplifies configuration, troubleshooting, and status monitoring and helps save time by streamlining common tasks.

"Extreme Networks has absolutely lowered our total cost of network ownership," said Jarvis. "With Extreme Networks switches, once you know one model, you know them all, unlike other vendors that require more training and certification as different models are deployed. It has made our jobs a lot easier and given us more time to focus on strategy and our core business."

Extreme Networks Qualiy of Service Helps City
Burbank is taking advantage of the eight levels of quality of service from Extreme Networks to meet performance requirements for Voice over IP and streaming video. Burbank streams video of footage from its local cable television channel, Channel 6, which broadcasts town meetings and other local issue programming. This allows Burbank residents without cable television to watch Channel 6 programming over the Internet, and residents traveling can keep up with local happenings while on the road.

With Extreme Networks, QoS policies are easy to define and assign to specific traffic groups and the range of profiles includes minimum bandwidth, maximum bandwidth and relative priority—all key to optimizing bandwidth management effectiveness. QoS policies provided by Extreme Networks helps protect Burbank's latency-sensitive voice and video traffic from bandwidth-intensive applications, while helping to ensure critical traffic gets through.

"We are very satisfied with Extreme Networks and look forward to working with the company on future infrastructure enhancement projects," concluded Jennifer Wyatt, Director of Information Technology for the city of Burbank.