Extreme Networks is growing its networking hardware portfolio today with new devices designed to help distributed enterprises improve connectivity, security and Application performance.

As part of the hardware rollout, Extreme announced its first entrant in the emerging space for Wi-Fi 7 wireless access points with the new AP5020. Wi-Fi 7 promises significantly higher speeds and lower latency compared to Wi-Fi 6. This makes it well-suited for bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive applications, such as IoT devices.

Extreme is also growing its Switch lineup with the new 4000 series of cloud-managed switches. This new line aims to accelerate deployment by eliminating most manual configuration steps. Key capabilities of the 4000 series switches include instant stacking to automatically set up multiple switches at once, instant port configuration, and instant secure port integration with ExtremeCloud Universal ZTNA (zero trust network access).

Wi-Fi 7 is about more than just 6 GHz

It's still very early in the deployment phase for Wi-Fi, with limited options for enterprises overall, but that will change over the course of 2024. The Wi-Fi 6E standard, like Wi-Fi 7, supports the 6 GHz band, providing more connectivity options for dense environments.

“Customers looking to deploy Wi-Fi 7 are likely either those in environments with mission-critical devices connected to the network, like health care or manufacturing, or customers who haven’t upgraded to 6 GHz Wi-Fi,” Hardik Ajmera, VP of product management at Extreme Networks, told SDxCentral.

Ajmera noted that the AP5020 is Extreme’s first Wi-Fi 7 access point and provides more capabilities than the company's Wi-Fi 6E-based access points. He explained that Wi-Fi 7 takes advantage of the 6 GHz band, as does Wi-Fi 6E, but adds additional features that will increase performance like 4K QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) capabilities. Additionally, Wi-Fi 7 brings with it ultra-wide 320 MHz channels, meaning more frequency space and very high potential data rates.

“Multi-Link Operation (MLO) is the most groundbreaking feature of Wi-Fi 7, enabling higher throughput, lower latency and increased reliability,” Ajmera explained. “This is where we will see the most significant differences in Wi-Fi generations, as MLO will give enterprises the confidence to support mission-critical and industrial Enterprise applications, even ones that are extremely bandwidth-intensive.”

PoE failover and dual IoT radio support industrial use cases for Wi-Fi

Extreme is also integrating a series of resiliency capabilities to help support mission-critical Wi-Fi deployments.

The AP5020 includes a dual IoT radio to support multiple IoT use cases simultaneously, enabling organizations to support devices such as sensors, electronic shelf labels, lighting or asset trackers across multiple IoT protocols from a single access point. The new Extreme access point also includes Power over Ethernet (PoE) failover, such that if power fails from one source, it can get power from a secondary source.

“This access point offers hitless failover and high availability designed for environments like manufacturing plants that need 24/7 network operations, as any downtime will directly correlate with lost revenue,” Ajmera said.

He explained that having one cable per Switch is typical, but because the AP5020 has two Ethernet ports and can run two cables to two different switches, if one Switch loses power, the AP is protected and operations can continue.

“Extreme prioritized this feature so we can continue to support our customers across industries that are heavily reliant on the network, so mission-critical activities can continue without interruption,” he said.

Cloud-managed switches integrate with ZTNA

The Extreme 4000 series of cloud-managed switches include the 4120 and 4220 Switch platforms.

The 4120 is available in 24-port and 48-port models, while the 4220 is available in 8, 12, 24 and 48-port models. Both the 4120 and 4220 can support up to 90W of PoE and both switches integrate multi-gigabit (1/2.5/5 Gb) access ports.

The Extreme 4000 series also supports ExtremeCloud Universal ZTNA for authentication and policy enforcement.

“The 4000 series are cloud-managed switches,” Ajmera said. “This means that customers using ExtremeCloud IQ or ExtremeCloud IQ Site Engine can access all the 4000 series Switch provisioning features within the ExtremeCloud IQ dashboard, giving them an easier user experience for everything related to Switch configuration, visibility, troubleshooting and management.”