This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Retail logistics firm Inmar scales with Extreme Networks Data Centre and Enterprise Network Solutions.
Extreme Networks, Inc. has announced that Inmar, a reverse logistics and promotions service provider for retailers, has deployed Extreme Networks' scalable, resilient and highly available network solutions featuring its 10 Gigabit data centre switches.
Faced with rapid growth and the need to manage hundreds of terabytes of critical information across its applications and service offerings, Inmar, which serves 1,200 business clients, had to find a network partner to tackle its business demands and requirements for constant network availability with full redundancy throughout its business divisions. Inmar set out to renovate its entire corporate network from the outer edge to the data center, which used a mix of legacy switching solutions that no longer met the availability and throughput required. Inmar wanted to deploy a highly available and fault tolerant infrastructure to better support its 800 employees and its dispersed facilities, including its headquarters and various remote sites.
After an exhaustive Request for Proposal process of leading vendors including Cisco and HP ProCurve, Inmar selected Extreme Networks and successfully carried out a complete network infrastructure upgrade consisting of its data centre, core and edge network solutions. The deployment of Extreme Networks comprehensive Ethernet infrastructure solutions have resulted in the performance, reliability and flexibility needed to support Inmar's technology-driven businesses.
Inmar chose Extreme Networks BlackDiamond 8800 series modular switches to enhance its data centre, including its NAS Storage system and network core that supports MS Exchange file systems and specialised business applications. Inmar also selected Extreme Networks Summit X450a solutions as its "top of rack" solution for its data center infrastructure, driving both Gigabit performance and efficiency to greatly improve server and file transfer speeds. These switch solutions also enable Inmar to easily scale the network to meet future demands as business operations expand.
"Extreme Networks has answered the call as we expand our business, consolidate the data center and migrate to 10 Gigabit Ethernet core and Gigabit converged edge across our campus," said Hugh Wilkins, senior manager of Information Technology for Inmar. "Based on its high levels of redundancy and superior flexibility due to its open standards approach and consistent software features, Extreme Networks met our foremost priorities. Our data center now has the intelligence, flexibility and bandwidth to manage multiple terabytes of data across our virtualised server environment."
In addition to bringing 10 Gigabit performance, Inmar required the network to complement its existing converged services. Extreme Networks' solutions provide the highly available, non-blocking Gigabit architecture to help ensure the performance needed to provide reliable voice IP to Inmar's employees. The complete deployment is centrally managed through Extreme EPICenter to simplify configuration, troubleshooting and status monitoring for continuous uptime to better serve Inmar's 24x7, 365 day a year operation.
"Inmar prides itself on its technology-driven services to support critical customer programs that require intensive coordination for managing coupon and promotional campaigns for retailers. Our network infrastructure had to meet the tough standards set by our IT staff to accomplish this," said Wilkins. "Extreme's Ethernet switching solutions offered the performance needed at all levels -- database, application support, server and desktop -- to guarantee we met these tough customer challenges."
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