Cisco beefing up WAFS
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems is stepping up to the plate in the highly competitive application acceleration game, banking on technology and a lot of end-to-end network expertise to set it apart from other players. The company will announce on Tuesday that it is beefing up the WAFS (Wide-Area File Services) software it introduced last year so it can speed up application transactions and file transfers. It is also adding compression and other techniques so application traffic wonât take up so much network bandwidth, said Mark Weiner, director of marketing for application solutions at Cisco. Also this week, the company is set to roll out WAAS (Wide-Area Application Services) software, as well as more powerful versions of its WAE (Wide-Area Application Engine) appliances on which to run it. There will also be a WAAS module for Ciscoâs Integrated Services Router. Wide-area bandwidth is expensive, and software overhead can slow down applications even on a fat pipe. Wide-area file services allow companies to speed up the performance of those applications by caching copies of files locally and then managing updates and changes. Cisco competes with companies such as Juniper, which purchased WAFS vendor Peribit, and Riverbed, an application acceleration startup that enhanced its software and appliances last week and is aiming to go public. Cisco is late to the game with some of its new technology, but it can offer peace of mind by making the products work smoothly with a Cisco infrastructure, said Eric Siegel, an analyst at Burton Group. Pairing up Cisco gear worked well for the city of Fort Wayne, Ind., which wants to use WAAS to speed up communication with some of its fire stations, said CIO Clifford Clarke. WAAS seems to have performed better with Fort Wayneâs Cisco network than did other vendorsâ products, he said. Harold Hamm, vice president of IT at architecture firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills, said he couldnât buy the kind of WAN bandwidth heâd need to match his test results with the new gear. âOnce a big file gets cached on a local server, itâs like working on a LAN,â he said.
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Cisco Systems Inc. announced a broad set of security capabilities to bring wireless LAN networks into the same security compliance as wired networks, in a bid to help companies comply with federal regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
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Ziff Davis - At half the price of its high-end system, the new ftServer W Series 2300 system offers users an alternative to clusters.
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Cisco Systems used the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco to trumpet its transformation from "packet pusher" to "infrastructure" company, unveiling a string of product updates that unify its diverse security portfolio on Monday.
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Cisco Systems this week will introduce a new line of routers with integrated services that combine concurrent data, security, and voice features in one system.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Just days after Cisco System
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Internet hardware giant Cisco Systems is said to be preparing to launch a new family of routers that can manage both voice and data applications.
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Cisco Systems' Linksys division rolls out its first network-attached storage for businesses.
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SAN FRANCISCO - The many new mechanisms to secure and speed up applications running on networks are heading for consolidation that should make it easier and less expensive to deliver the kind of performance end users want.
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InfoWorld - Triple plays are rare in baseball. But Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers plans to do one better Wednesday by promising to pull off a "quadruple play" in the networking business: incorporating data, voice, video, and mobile capabilities across its product lines.
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Putting the family jewels on display Cisco has confirmed plans to open up its holy of holies: it'll let third parties develop applications for the Internetwork Operating System (IOS), the software leg of its cash cow router business.â¦
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Cisco has sealed an alliance with Fujitsu in a bid to boosts its Japanese market presence. Fujitsu will act as a reseller for Cisco&#39;s high-end routing systems, especially the ultra-high-end
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It&#39;s hard to overstate how important the&#160;Nexus data-center switching platform, set to be unveiled Monday, is to Cisco Systems: for the dominant networking vendor&#39;s enterprise business, it&#39;s the biggest thing since the Catalyst 6000, which made its debut in 1999, according to the two key executives on the project.At a dinner with press last week, they compared it to the CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System), a huge switch for the core of carrier networks that Cisco rolled out in 2004. To bring that platform to life, the company developed a new version of its flagship IOS (Internetworking Operating System) software and engineered the hardware to scale up to 92Tbps of throughput. The core of the Internet is Cisco&#39;s turf, and it wasn&#39;t willing to give any ground to upstarts.The Nexus brings Cisco into not just a new territory for its business, but a new product category: a unified switch that spans storage and computing in datacenters and has security built in. Given the stakes, superlatives are natural.-- A single Nexus chassis will be able to handle more than 15Tbps of traffic ripping through a data center, up from just 2Tbps for a current Catalyst 6500 switch.-- At that rate, the switch could run 5 million concurrent transcontinental conferencing sessions using Cisco&#39;s TelePresence Collaboration system. It could also copy the entire searchable Internet in 7.5 minutes.-- One interface module for the Nexus 7000 chassis will come with 32 10Gbps ports, and the platform is designed to support future interfaces including 100Gbps.-- The company spent about $250 million on research and development for the new platform, and at its peak, the Nexus R&amp;D team numbered more than 500 engineers, according to Tom Edsall, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco&#39;s Data Center Business Unit.As with the Catalyst 6000 Series and the CRS-1, Cisco developed the Nexus with an eye to long-term needs. Where the CRS marked the debut of IOS XR, the first modular version of IOS, the Nexus will have Cisco&#39;s first OS that can be fully virtualized, called NX-OS. The Nexus will also break new ground with its lossless switching fabric, a departure from traditional Ethernet -- though backward compatible with it, Cisco said.The system also represents a gamble on FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), a still-emerging standard for sending traditional Fibre Channel storage network traffic over Ethernet. Though the new standard will probably succeed with the backing of Cisco and other big vendors, the installed base of Fibre Channel is huge, said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. There will be a proving period for Ethernet as a reliable, lossless datacenter transport, he said.Cisco expects the uptake of the new platform to take time, just as it did with the CRS. The first Nexus product will go on sale in the second quarter of this year, and in the first year Cisco expects to see mostly trials of the new system, said Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco&#39;s datacenter group. Deployments will probably start to pick up in the second, third and fourth years after the introduction, she said.But just as the opportunity was huge for the CRS, as video and other traffic rose fast on carrier networks, the chance to capture next-generation datacenters is likely to justify Cisco&#39;s efforts on the Nexus line. Web-based services and applications, as well as outsourced computing offerings from Amazon.com and other companies, are powering the growth of massive data centers. Microsoft&#39;s MSN division is a test customer of the Nexus, said Ullal. Asked whether the mighty Google would buy in as well, Ullal said, &quot;I would hope so.&quot;
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Cisco Systems has announced an eight-slot single-shelf version of its CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, which is designed to let service providers offer services like edge, core and peering for
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(InfoWorld) - Triple plays are rare in baseball. But Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers plans to do one better Wednesday by promising to pull off a "quadruple play" in the networking business: incorporating data, voice, video, and mobile capabilities across its product lines. Chambers, speaking at the company's annual analyst conference in New York City, said the unified communications strategy would be necessary to sustain Cisco's growth in the next decade and stave off competition from startups and pure-play vendors in those areas. Saying "the network becomes the platform," Chambers predicted product integrations fueled by a business trend to move to more collaborative management models. That change will make video collaboration tools more important, boosting network traffic and the need for new infrastructure downstream, he said. Cisco will also update earlier product lines with features that will allow service providers to have more quality control over applications, according to Mike Volpi, senior vice president of the company's routing and service provider technology group. The idea is that with more controls, providers can charge more for premium services, and generally upgrade application features. For example, the 12000 Series routers will add per-session control for business VOIP and video in this fiscal year, he said. The 7600 Series routers will gain per-session controls and subscriber-aggregation features, he said. While attendees said they would like more specifics about upcoming products, several agreed that certain specifics about the business appear to position the company for further growth. Powell indicated that the company would offer a dividend to investors. This is one sign that the company is confident of its growth predictions, said Mark Sue, an analyst with brokerage RBC Capital Markets. "Of course we'd like to know when, but that is a positive sign," Sue said.
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John Chambers, chief executive of  network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc , said on  Tuesday service providers will continue to upgrade and build  out their networks for a decade.
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InfoWorld - Cisco Systems&#160;has&#160;expanded&#160;a&#160;range of security mechanisms for wired LANs&#160;to the&#160;wireless side of enterprise networks.