Rancho Water Taps Extreme Networks to Support Delivery of Critical Water Services to Thousands of California Residents

By AIT News Desk On May 20, 2020

Public Utility Company Leverages Secure and Resilient Wired and Wireless Network Solutions To Power 45,000 Service Connections Across 100,000 Acres

Extreme Networks, a cloud-driven networking company, announced Rancho California Water District, an essential public utility in Temecula, California, has deployed Extreme’s networking solutions to connect and power its vast, 24/7 operations. Rancho Water delivers high-quality water and reclamation services to 155,000 customers across 150 square miles every day, and it prioritizes safety, redundancy, and reliability in its operations. Extreme provides a secure and resilient technology infrastructure and an effortless networking experience so the utility’s small IT team can focus on delivering new applications and analytics-driven services for its growing customer base, rather than outages.

Rancho Water has worked with Extreme Networks for 15 years. The utility initially selected Extreme to provide Ethernet automatic protection switching (EAPS), a cost-effective solution for enabling a redundant network connection between facilities. The utility worked with Extreme to make additional network updates over time, including upgrading all links between intermediate distribution frames (IDFs) and data centers to 10G and multi-line fiber. Today, leveraging wired and wireless networking solutions from the Extreme Elements portfolio to support 45,000 service connections, Rancho Water maintains continual uptime, control, and security throughout its 100,000-acre service area.

Key Benefits:

End-to-end visibility and control: With Extreme Management Center,™ Rancho Water has granular, end-to-end visibility into every port and every device that logs onto its network. A network access control function allows the IT team to identify anomalistic events and provides control at the device level across all systems. With the confidence they’ve gained from easier control and management, Rancho Water is planning to deploy IoT devices across its network to help monitor and deliver key services.

No single point of failure: With ExtremeSwitching technology configured in an EAPS ring to connect multiple sites – including two campus locations, two data centers, 10 IDFs, multiple internet connections and wireless throughout the enterprise – Rancho Water has eliminated single points of failure on its distributed network and established redundancy, which allows the organization to reliably support community-wide water needs, even in the event of a system outage.

Uninterrupted uptime: ExtremeSwitching solutions offer high-performance, low latency connectivity and automatic provisioning of services for each device. Through a combination of role-based policies, secure link encryption, and hyper-segmentation, and the benefit of an EAPS configuration for failover between its wired and wireless networks, Rancho Water maintains a secure network with uninterrupted connectivity.

Executive Perspectives

Dale Badore, Data Center Operations Supervisor, Rancho Water
“Our experience working with Extreme Networks has been unbelievably positive, and really – effortless. Thanks to Extreme, we’ve never lost connection between our data centers because we’ve configured it to switch from fiber to wireless, allowing data to flow continuously. It’s amazing when you think about it – the design allows us to suffer failure at any connection or interconnection point without affecting anyone. A public utility should demand nothing less.”

Abby Strong, Vice President of Product Marketing, Extreme Networks, Inc.
“Rancho Water provides a critical resource to more than 155,000 community members every day — it needs a network that’s up to that great task. In such a demanding environment, Extreme solutions help Rancho Water’s IT staff to maintain control and visibility at all times to ensure uptime, glean valuable insights that can improve operations, and spot anomalous activity in real-time to prevent potential issues from causing damage.”