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

SAN JOSE, Calif., September 5, 2006 - Cisco Systems®, 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 http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

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