Making a smart city vision a reality

Home to FedEx and the world's second busiest cargo airport, Memphis is the global leader in transportation, distribution, and logistics. With a large population and a city footprint of roughly 324 square miles, it faces some challenges with delivering efficient and effective public services.

To solve this, Memphis is working to deploy a smart, flexible network that lays the groundwork for a future-forward, resilient transportation system that seamlessly moves people, traffic, and cargo through the City. For example, Memphis looks to deploy autonomous trucks and an intelligent routing system for transporting citizens and packages, which will both greatly enhance transit and place entirely new demands on the City's network infrastructure.

Pioneering smart city initiatives depend on an agile, adaptive, secure infrastructure. By deploying Extreme's Automated Campus solutions, including switching, management, and analytics technology, as well as Extreme Professional Services, the City can simplify network management, accommodate growing bandwidth demands, and support the use of forward-looking technologies as it continues its digital transformation efforts. Initial deployments will enable AI-powered IP camera implementations at 27 community centers to provide real-time anomaly detection.

Key benefits:

• Automated, software-driven infrastructure: With ExtremeSwitching hardware and Extreme Fabric Connect, the City of Memphis has the tools to implement cross-domain and workflow automation when and where it needs to within its massive network infrastructure – a critical capability as its 90-person IT team continues its aggressive digital transformation efforts.
• Visibility, control, and security for IoT devices: In smart cities and large-scale IoT deployments with hundreds of thousands of mobile and IoT devices connecting to the network, the potential attack surface significantly expands, creating entirely new vulnerabilities to protect against. Extreme's Fabric Connect enables the City of Memphis to segment its network according to traffic type and create private virtual networks to protect and isolate critical services without any IP reachability in or out.
• Centralised management and granular analytics: In complex smart city environments, unified visibility and control is critical. Leveraging Extreme Management Centre, The City of Memphis will gain a 360° view of the wired and wireless network, users, devices, and applications. With ExtremeAnalytics, they'll have granular, real-time insights, allowing the IT team to determine which devices and applications are consuming the most bandwidth, and speed up troubleshooting.

Abby Strong, Vice President of Product Marketing, Extreme Networks said:"The City of Memphis is already making impressive strides in its smart city initiatives, deploying AI-powered IP cameras in dozens of community centres to improve safety and communications. But it's just the tip of the iceberg. With a secure, automated network at its core, Memphis has laid the fabric across the city to create new, tech-driven experiences and achieve greater efficiencies and quality of life for its citizens."

Michael Rodriguez, CIO, City of Memphis said: "The City's vision is to use technology to tackle some of our most difficult challenges, from pollution and traffic to health and public safety. As we move toward that future, we need a robust, secure, software-driven infrastructure that can interface with third-party solutions, and provide a path to automation. The solutions that Extreme provides will be instrumental in making our city one of the smartest in America."