Cisco Expands Borderless Networks Portfolio With New Products Across Switching, Routing, Security and Mobility

Latest Innovations Provide High-Performance, High-Density Solutions for Cloud, Virtual Desktop and Wired-Wireless Environments

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Cisco announced today new products and services across all the functional elements of its Borderless Network architecture — the switching, routing, security and wireless portfolios. Notable additions include the highest-performing and high-density Cisco® Catalyst® switch, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance firewall and compact Cisco ASR 1000 Series router in their classes; new entry-level 802.11n wireless access points for smaller businesses; and new and enhanced smart-services offerings.

Additionally, Cisco announced the Application Velocity Network Service, a new network service that accelerates application performance physically and virtually. For more information on the Application Velocity Network Service announcement, click here. To attend today’s live online event where Cisco will highlight both announcements, click here.
Key Highlights:

The new products and professional and technical services Cisco announced today extend the company’s Borderless Networks portfolio to address the growing need for high-performance, highly reliable and highly secure application delivery from a smaller number of consolidated data centers to a growing number of wired and wireless endpoints, while optimizing overall resource utilization and footprint.

High-Performance and High-Density Innovations:

* The Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series switch, the industry’s most widely deployed modular platform, raises the bar in performance for campus switching by delivering 848 gigabits per second of system bandwidth and the highest density of 384 Power over Ethernet Plus (PoEP)-capable ports. With the new Supervisor Engine 7-E, the Catalyst 4500E also drives market transitions from 1G Fiber to 10G Fiber as a price/performance aggregation switch with 100 ports at 10G. Fully loaded with hardware-accelerated Borderless Network Services like Cisco Medianet, Cisco EnergyWise, and Cisco TrustSec, it is now powered by Cisco IOS® XE Software, enabling the delivery of third-party services. The Catalyst 4500E delivers best-in-class access resiliency with sub-10-millisecond supervisor failover utilizing the In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) functionality and enriched application visibility with Cisco IOS Flexible NetFlow. The new switch can provide investment protection with backward and forward compatibility.
* The Cisco ASA 5585-X Adaptive Security Appliance delivers MultiScale performance in a compact two-rack-unit form factor. The ASA 5585-X provides new levels of speed and scale, supporting 20 Gbps of multiprotocol throughput and 35Gbps of large packet throughput of maximum firewall performance, 10,000 VPN connections, 350,000 connections per second and 8 million total connections, along with industry-leading threat defense from Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and always-on remote access using Cisco AnyConnect. Ideal for mission-critical data centers, it provides a security system that sets the bar for performance with eight times the performance density of its competitors.
* The Cisco ASR 1001 router is the industry’s most compact edge routing solution at one rack unit and the highest-performance router for its size. It delivers up to 5Gbps performance throughput with services turned on, enabling deployment agility in high-end enterprise branch, WAN edge and managed services environments. The Cisco ASR 1001 supports an on-demand performance upgrade from 2.5Gbps to 5Gbps as well as incremental services on-demand.
* The Cisco Aironet® 1040 Series Access Point expands Cisco’s mobility portfolio and accelerates the adoption of 802.11n by providing enterprise performance with an entry-level price, reduced operational complexity and a competitive feature set.

End-User Security and Energy-Saving Enhancements:

* Cisco AnyConnect 3.0 further expands network endpoint capabilities with new IPsec IKEv2 support in addition to Secure Sockets Layer and Datagram Transport Layer Security, an integrated 802.1X supplicant, and 802.1AE MACSec support. This new release of AnyConnect also supports hybrid secure mobility deployments by extending protection to mobile workers through ScanSafe cloud security services as well as on-premises Web security appliances. Finally, industry adoption for AnyConnect continues at a rapid pace with support for Apple OSX, Apple iOS, Windows 7, and additional mobile platforms.
* Cisco EnergyWise can deliver even more cost savings by rapidly growing Cisco Developer Network partnerships to include APC by Schneider Electric, a leading data center physical infrastructure provider, as well as smart power-distribution-unit manufacturers including Cyber Switching, Raritan, Server Technology and WTI. This broadens the reach of EnergyWise to include clientless devices like printers, copy machines and digital media displays, managed at the plug level, and to the data center, providing a solution that monitors the power usage for all the devices in the data center racks.

Deployment and Optimization Innovations:

* SBA Enterprise, a series of prescriptive blueprints to help simplify a phased approach to planning and deployment, lets customers with up to 10,000 connected devices deploy Borderless Networks using Cisco tested and validated solutions.
* CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution 4.0 provides a comprehensive and fully integrated management tool with intuitive work centers to automate workflows and ease deployment for Borderless Network services such as Cisco EnergyWise and Cisco TrustSec, in addition to simplifying monitoring and troubleshooting the network.
* Cisco is also announcing new and enhanced smart services to help customers realize the full value of their network investments. The new Cisco Smart Net Total Care Service, which scales to large enterprises, provides IT professionals the unique ability to see exactly what is going on in their networks, allowing them to increase operational efficiency, reduce risk, and lower support costs on a proactive basis. For mid-market customers, Cisco is significantly expanding the scope of Smart Care, which combines complementary strengths of Cisco Services and its certified partners, to cover more products and much larger networks, and deliver proactive, network-level support.

Supporting Quotes:

* Jake Seitz, enterprise architect, CoreLogic:

“Work is not a place—it’s a thing you do. Our employees are highly mobile. They need to communicate and collaborate and get the right information when they are with our customers.Cisco’s Borderless Network is already a big part of our solution for enabling that. The solutions announced today show Cisco has the vision to make certain our business demands never exceed our infrastructure capabilities.”

* Steve Brookman, global head of communications, Man Investments:

“Man has chosen the Cisco Catalyst 4500E Supervisor 7-E as the strategic campus switching platform of choice for our medium to large office locations. New features such as Flexible NetFlow will give our operations team an insight into the use of the network at the edge that previously was not possible. During testing we have been particularly impressed with both the performance and reliability of the ISSU feature, as well as the maturity and flexibility of the 802.1x feature set. We also believe that the exponential increase in hardware resources from previous models within this platform provides the ability to support new features in the future and offers excellent investment protection.”

* Brett Galloway, senior vice president, Wireless, Security & Routing Technology Group, Cisco:

“IT managers want to use the network to support the needs of the business. But the business is changing, and IT managers are under increasing pressure to make the network available to anyone, anywhere, anytime and on any device—in a highly secure, reliable, seamless manner. This is precisely the challenge that the Cisco Borderless Network was designed to address. This third expansion of the Borderless Networks portfolio is designed to help customers reach new levels of innovation and participation by engaging their customers and employees to create entirely new ways of doing business.”


About Cisco Systems

Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, this year celebrates 25 years of technology innovation, operational excellence and corporate social responsibility. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.