SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Extreme Networks, today announced that international law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis LLP ("K&L Gates") has deployed its wired and wireless networking solutions across its new flagship London office.

With 1,400 lawyers located in 22 cities on three continents; K&L Gates had a number of key requirements for its new network. With the legal industry becoming increasingly reliant on electronic documents and communications, the network needed to be robust. It needed to support K&L Gates' 300 UK employees, but be capable of scaling when required, to accommodate future growth. The company was also determined to ensure the replacement network could handle IP telephony and video conferencing.

“Our objective was to upgrade to an enterprise grade network that is convergence-ready and capable of handling high-bandwidth applications such as video and voice over IP,” explains K&L Gates’ Head of Office IS Operations, Andrew Collier.

K&L Gates has 17 offices in the US, all of which have a data network infrastructure based on Extreme Networks’ products. So when it came to replacing the London network, Collier already knew that Extreme products would meet requirements for resiliency and convergence grade availability.

The solution that Extreme Networks implemented in the London office comprised two BlackDiamond 8810 chassis based switches to form the core and a mixture of Summit 400 24 and 48 port switches for the edge. The BlackDiamond switches not only offered the firm a highly scalable platform but also 99.999% availability, through a combination of redundant system design, modular operating system and Extreme’s RFC 3619 Ethernet Automatic Protection System (EAPS) offering sub 50 milliseconds failover on network connections. The wireless element included a Summit WM100 wireless switch and four Altitude 350 access points. The whole network is centrally managed with Extreme’s EPICentre management platform so that the US and UK offices could be managed as whole when required.

“The upgrade was an important project for the firm and I could not risk it delaying the relocation of staff. The project was completed on time and I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly everything went,” comments Collier.

Extreme Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: EXTR)