Cisco Introduces a Set of WAAS WAN Optimization Appliances to Help Organizations Deliver Business Applications with a High-Quality Experience Across Corporate Networks
With the rapidly increasing number of Internet-based applications, Cisco is focusing on helping its customers deliver more Web-based software applications and rich media content across networks at scale and with high quality to any user and device. To achieve this goal, the company today introduced the next generation of its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) appliances – the Cisco family of WAN (wide area network) optimization solutions.
The new Cisco WAASappliances help customers improve application performance for bandwidth-heavy applications such as virtual desktops, cloud services, video and mobile devices at branch locations. The new appliances also help organizations substantially improve the user experience across their entire network infrastructure by providing up to five times the bandwidth and supporting up to three times the users than the previous generation.
As an example of the greater scalability of Cisco’s new WAN optimization line, a single new appliance can allow an organization of 150,000 employees to simultaneously use virtual desktops over Apple iPad or other tablets, while delivering the highest possible user experience to each one. A WAAS appliance can also reduce the time it takes to download a typical PowerPoint presentation to any tablet of any user in any branch office from 30 seconds to only one second, and also has the ability to simultaneously stream 400 high-definition videos to 150,000 employee devices.
These second-generation WAN optimization solutions improve IT efficiency and cut total cost of ownership by lowering an organization’s bandwidth usage and reducing the amount of hardware previously required by 66 percent. They offer a consistent, flexible deployment model that avoids network redesigns and provides IT managers with greater visibility to optimize network resources and ensure a consistent end-user experience.
Announcement Highlights
Cisco WAAS Appliances
- The new Cisco WAAS appliances support both branch and data center deployments: new Cisco 294, 594, and 694 appliances enable branch offices to deploy up to eight virtual services such as video, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and Windows on WAAS, with five times the throughput.
- The new Cisco 694, 7541, 7571, and 8541 appliances provide large branch offices and data centers with the industry’s most scalable 10GE-capable WAN optimization solution.
- These new Cisco appliances along with the router-integrated, on-demand WAAS on the Cisco Integrated Services Router Generation 2 provide organizations with the most comprehensive WAN Optimization portfolio in the industry. The ISR G2 family of routers provides a borderless workspace experience through service virtualization, video-ready capabilities, and operational excellence.
- The new Cisco appliances are managed via the Cisco WAAS central manager and support integrated reporting.
- All products are now available.
New Cisco WAAS Software
- Cisco is also announcing Cisco WAAS v4.4 software, which brings together application and network optimization with the industry’s first context-aware DRE. By adding application-intelligence to DRE (data redundancy elimination), Cisco WAAS with context-aware DRE is designed to enable customers to support a dramatically greater number of video or virtual desktop sessions from a single system, doubling the effective throughput of those systems without decreasing the overall experience to any location.
