Cisco Extends Catalyst Switching Products for SMBs
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Cisco Systems has released a suite of new Cisco Catalyst switching products and services specifically designed and priced for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
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Cisco Systems(R) (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced an extension to its industry-leading CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, the core of the Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture.
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IBM is extending a hand to businesses looking to improve their communications systems with a new package of hardware, software, and support services that rely on traditional IP-based networks.
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Touting improved security, availability and network-wide 10 GbE speeds, Cisco today unveiled a slew of upgraded Catalyst switches that are set to ship in December and early 2005.
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Cisco has released a new line of switches and services for small and medium sized businesses aimed at helping companies with 100 to 1000 employees deploy converged voice
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Start-up's new high-end Ethernet switches promise better port density, a challenge to second-tier sellers--or maybe to Cisco?
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(InfoWorld) - Over the next few months, Cisco plans to enhance a range of its security products, offering customers an integrated and improved line of products. The company plans a major new release to the software that runs its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) product. Also in the works are updates to the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), Cisco Security Agent (CSA), Cisco Security Manager (CSM), and Mitigation Analysis and Response System (MARS). The upcoming Version 8.0 of the ASA software will include about 120 enhancements, but perhaps most significantly, its AnyConnect VPN client will now work on a much broader range of platforms, including Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Edition. "We're extending this out of the traditional realm of just laptops," said Bob Berlin, a Cisco senior product marketing manager. Cisco is also improving the information-sharing capabilities between its IPS 6.0 and CSA 5.2 software to make the products better able to identify and block emerging threats. Another new feature will allow CSA to assign quality-of-service tagging to network traffic so performance can be boosted on applications such as VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol). Using engineering talent it acquired in its 2004Â purchase of Riverhead Networks, Cisco has also developed new algorithms that allow the IPS software to better analyze potentially malicious activity on the network. The ISA software will also be better integrated and easier to manage with the upcoming version 3.1 of CSM. After years of acquisitions, Cisco is just now starting to hook its security products together, said Robert Whiteley, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. This is critical if Cisco wants to maintain its new position as a player in the security space, he said. "Whether people acknowledge it or not, Cisco is one of the largest security vendors," Whiteley said. "But they haven't had quite as much of an integrated story as you'd see from a [security ] specialist." Cisco has had a lot of integrating to do. The company has made about 10 security-related acquisitions in the past three years. The company now posts more than $2 billion in annual security product sales and employs more than 1,400 security engineers, according to Richard Palmer, senior vice president of Cisco's Security Technology Group. Cisco may be starting to integrate its existing security products now, but it would also like to extend its offerings to address new areas such as data leakage, a hot new area in the security field. "That's certainly an area where we're going to be investing, " Palmer said.
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Cisco Systems Inc., whose core business is selling the routers and switches that direct data traffic over computer networks, said it has acquired a small social networking company that allows businesses to create MySpace-like communities on their Web sites.
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Cisco Systems gives its Web services business a boost with the acquisition of Reactivity.
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As servers and storage start to merge into unified, virtualized systems, Cisco wants to do the same thing with the networks that connect them.On Monday, the company is set to unveil a datacenter networking platform that eventually could take the place of both the Ethernet switches that link servers as well as the Fibre Channel devices that form storage networks. The Nexus series is designed both to meet exploding demands for bandwidth and energy efficiency within data centers and to simplify the jobs of IT administrators. In the process, it could help give Cisco the central role it seeks in IT infrastructure.Cisco is already a leading player in datacenter networks with its&#160;Catalyst series Ethernet switches&#160;and its MDS storage network platform. Now it hopes to transcend those separate systems using a single, unified switching fabric and the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard. The platform it will use, called Nexus, will be a line of routing switches in chassis, rack-mounted and blade form. The first of these, the Nexus 7000 chassis, will be generally available in the second quarter. Prices will start at $75,000, but a typical configuration will cost about $200,000, according to Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco&#39;s Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group.Mark Drake is looking at the Nexus platform for future-proofing as his company, Health Management Associates, centralizes its data resources. The company runs about 60 hospitals, mostly in the Southeastern U.S. Health Management&#39;s current Catalyst switches are probably enough to handle connectivity needs in its data centers for the next two years, but it&#39;s hard to predict storage and processing requirements beyond that as he looks for the next generation, Drake said.&quot;I&#39;m looking at a little over ten years&#39; capacity,&quot; Drake said. The Nexus line is built to go far beyond the scale of the Catalysts, delivering more than 15Tbps. &quot;The capacity to grow is huge,&quot; he said.Another benefit Drake sees in the Nexus, which he has been told about but hasn&#39;t tested, is ease of management. Health Management is already trying to reduce IT staff costs by consolidating data centers from each hospital to a two main locations. Because the new platform combines storage and data switching along with security in a single switch and management interface, it could further simplify running those datacenters, he said.Initially, Cisco sees the Nexus switches at the core of datacenters that still use separate networks for processing and storage. But as FCoE emerges in storage systems, the Nexus could become the single connectivity platform, Ullal said. Its switching fabric is designed to be lossless, unlike a standard Ethernet system, which tolerates dropped packets, said Tom Edsall, senior vice president and CTO of the data center group. The platform also has built-in security features, including wire-speed encryption and authentication capability for each port.At the heart of the platform is a new, virtualized operating system, NX OS. As with server virtualization, NX OS can turn a Nexus switch into multiple logical switches running totally different processes, Ullal said . For example, one logical switch could handle storage and be managed by storage specialists, while the other links servers and is run by a different staff. A third could be a test platform. All would use a single switching fabric and set of redundant power supplies, which provides benefits in performance, economies of scale, and resiliency, she said. This virtualized architecture eventually will trickle down to other Cisco product lines, according to Ullal.Cisco also has automated some aspects of management with the Nexus line, drawing on best practices it learned partly from its customers, Edsall said. The system is designed to monitor and heal itself in many cases.The network&#39;s role in datacenters is growing as computing and storage are combined and shared, according to industry analysts. It&#39;s now the &quot;orchestrator&quot; of the datacenter, Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group said. Cisco is the only vendor with both the networking and the computing experience to fulfill that role, he believes. But though many managers of datacenters want to see total virtualization of the datacenter, which could boost efficiency, they aren&#39;t yet ready for it.&quot;We&#39;re just entering the very early stages of the virtual datacenter,&quot; Kerravala said. &quot;This is probably at least two years away.&quot;Cisco is best positioned to build the core of datacenters because the network touches everything in it, according to Ullal, Edsall, and other executives.&quot;For Cisco, it&#39;s very critical that this platform be a launching pad to go further up the IT stack,&quot; said IDC&#39;s Cindy Borovick. However, taking control of datacenters won&#39;t be a walk in the park, she cautioned.&quot;Cisco&#39;s in a very strong position, but there are other very large suppliers that recognize how important the datacenter is and are willing to invest the R&amp;D dollars,&quot; Borovick said, citing IBM and Sun Microsystems. To Cisco&#39;s peril, datacenter administrators are more than willing to buy the best of many vendors rather than standardize on one, because they control the &quot;crown jewels&quot; of the enterprise, she said.
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Products promise more flexibility for corporate customers logging on to the company network.
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Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO.O on Tuesday   launched a Web-based product to help businesses deliver live   and on-demand videos to large groups, in its latest push to   expand into the enterprise video market.
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Cisco is announcing an eight-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module for its Catalyst 6500 switches, doubling the number of ports available to users and increasing overall switching performance by 60%.
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Cisco Systems has added two products to its award-winning Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Intelligent directors and fabric switches optimized for transporting storage area network (SAN) traffic outside of the data center, which make them ideally
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Cisco Systems&#39; collaboration with Microsoft to target the SMB market is starting to bear fruit as the networking vendor Monday launched a new application that integrates Microsoft CRM with its VoIP platform.
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Tomorrow Cisco Systems Inc. will announce an upgrade to its small business and branch office line of routers, incorporating more processing speed and a raft of new features.
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Vendors have begun to release products that are taking the next steps in the evolution to true services-centric networking.