Cisco Introduces Integrated Branch-Office Solution That Improves Application Performance and Consolidates Infrastructure

Cisco's Wide-Area Application Services Combines WAN Optimization,
Application Acceleration and WAFS to Cost Effectively
Transform Branch Office IT Operations

Cisco Systems(R) (NASDAQ:CSCO) today announced an integrated
branch-office solution that accelerates the performance of any
TCP-based application across the wide-area network (WAN) and enables
the consolidation of the branch office server, storage and backup
infrastructure for easier management and lower cost.
The solution includes recently released Cisco Wide Area
Application Services (WAAS), the industry's most comprehensive and
scalable branch-office networking software, providing WAN
optimization, application acceleration, and Wide-Area File Services
(WAFS) in one easy-to-deploy solution. Cisco today also introduced a
network module for running WAAS software on the Cisco integrated
services router (ISR), of which more than one million units are
deployed worldwide. For added ease of implementation across the
enterprise, Cisco WAAS solution is also offered as a stand-alone
appliance.
This state-of-the-art branch office solution combined with Cisco
Application Networking Services is designed to scale to support
thousands of branch offices and up to millions of TCP connections with
up to 16 gigabits per second performance in a fully scaled,
load-balanced deployment. It is completely transparent to customers'
existing networks and helps enable a smooth integration with
pre-established network security and WAN traffic policies.
Sabre Holdings, a global retailer of travel products and
distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry, has
already experienced the performance and benefits of Cisco WAAS.
"The Cisco WAAS solution is helping us to sustain performance and
optimize bandwidth for our global remote end-users around the world,
without expensive WAN upgrades. It also helps us address the latency
issues we have experienced across the WAN related to our
applications," said David Gula, Manager Desktop Infrastructure, Sabre
Holdings. "We have started our global roll-out of the Cisco WAAS
solution with sites in the Netherlands, U.K., India, and Uruguay."
Enterprises are increasingly attempting to centralize and
consolidate their application and file servers and data in order to
comply with government regulations and simplify branch IT operations.
A major obstacle is the impact of latency, limited bandwidth and
network packet loss on application performance across the WAN. Cisco
WAAS overcomes these obstacles to provide enterprises with an easy way
to consolidate distributed branch servers, storage and backup
infrastructure while ensuring high application performance to end
users. In addition, by being transparently integrated into enterprise
networks, WAAS enables customers to extend the benefits from their
investments in Cisco WAN infrastructure.
"Branch employee productivity is threatened as companies
consolidate their branch office servers and applications into data
centers, resulting in increased latency and poor response times from
applications being delivered across the WAN," said George Kurian, vice
president of the application delivery business unit of Cisco Systems.
"Cisco WAAS is an integrated, next-generation branch office solution
that enables companies to transform their branch IT operations while
working to ensure that branch employees continue to have highly
reliable, high-performance access to business-critical corporate
applications and data."
To accelerate application and file performance, and to optimize
WAN bandwidth utilization, Cisco WAAS incorporates several
industry-leading application acceleration, WAFS, and WAN optimization
techniques, including compression, redundancy elimination, transport
optimizations, caching, and content distribution.
"Companies need to greatly improve their lagging application
response times to branch office end-users with as minimal additional
management as possible," said Zeus Kerravala, vice president of
infrastructure research and consulting at Yankee Group. "Cisco WAAS
combined with Cisco's existing IOS capabilities is delivering the most
comprehensive WAN optimization and application acceleration solution
that cleanly and simply integrates into existing branch and wide-area
network infrastructure to ease management."
A unique benefit for Cisco customers, WAAS is designed for
transparent integration with enterprises' IP networks and to work
seamlessly with the full suite of Cisco IOS services and
functionality. This helps ensure that IT managers can maintain
end-to-end visibility, monitoring, firewall security policies, and
quality of service (QoS) capabilities within their networks, without
requiring any changes to clients or servers. In addition, Cisco WAAS'
device auto-discovery capability speeds deployment into any network
topology and does not require configuring and maintaining separate
overlay networks.
"Through our experience with our broad customer base using our WAN
solution, we can say that latency has caused performance degradation
on their applications. To address this issue, we have tested Cisco's
Wide-Area Application Services solution in our labs and saw
significant productivity gains, which will allow us to provide more
satisfactory network solutions to our customers," said Kazu Yozawa,
vice president of NTT Communications' IT management service division.

Component of Cisco Application Networking Services

The WAAS solution is a part of Cisco's Application Networking
Services, a portfolio of application-aware networking products that
enhance the scalability, availability, security and performance of
data and applications from the data center to branch offices and
remote users. Cisco ANS also includes:

-- The Application Control Engine (ACE), which integrates server
load balancing, application security and unique virtual
partitioning capabilities for easier application
infrastructure management and deployment

-- The Application Velocity System (AVS), which accelerates and
secures Internet-facing applications

-- The Application and Content Networking System (ACNS), which
effectively delivers video to remote branches

Pricing and Availability

Cisco WAAS solution includes the Cisco WAAS software and the Cisco
Wide-Area Application Engine (WAE) appliance family as well as new
network modules (WAE-NM) that integrate with Cisco's popular 2800,
3700 and 3800 Series Integrated Services Routers. The appliance-based
branch office solution is available immediately starting at $8,500 and
the network module solution will be available later this year starting
at $4,000. For more information related to the WAAS solution, please
go to http://www.cisco.com/go/waas.

About Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO), is the worldwide leader in
networking for the Internet. Information on Cisco can be found at
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http://newsroom.cisco.com.

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