Cisco Application Velocity System (AVS) and Wide-area Application Engine (WAE) Set New Standard for Integrated and Highly Secure End-to-end Application Acceleration and Delivery

Cisco solution addresses end-to-end application networking delivery across branch and data centers

SAN JOSE, Calif., October 13, 2005 - Cisco Systems today announced the availability of new solutions for data center and branch deployment designed to optimize application performance, ease infrastructure consolidation and improve end-user productivity, enabling remote users to get LAN-like application response times over the WAN.

The new products include the Cisco Application Velocity System (AVS), a family of application acceleration, security and monitoring appliances for the data center, and the Cisco Wide-area Application Engine (WAE), a family of appliances designed to accelerate application delivery and provide file and rich media access to branch offices. The products are designed to provide mutual interoperability to help IT organizations overcome the performance and productivity-related challenges inherent to resource consolidation and network and application centralization, acting as mediators between applications and networks.

Hy-Vee, one of the top 30 privately-owned companies in the United States, with sales of more than $4.6 billion in 2004 and more than 200 retail stores across seven Midwestern states, has been using the technology from FineGround upon which Cisco AVS is based for more than three years. FineGround was acquired by Cisco in June this year.

“Hy-Vee has used FineGround’s Condenser product (now Cisco AVS) in conjunction with our Plumtree portal for three years with excellent results,” said Brad Styve, Systems Analyst, Hy-Vee, Inc. “Use of this technology to accelerate our Hy-VeeNet portal to users over the WAN reduces HTML traffic by as much as 90 percent and reduces overall frame relay bandwidth usage by 40 percent. This not only gives our users a better overall experience by speeding page delivery, it also lowers costs by decreasing the need for higher speed frame relay connections at our stores.”

Royal Mail Group, plc, a public limited company wholly owned by the UK Government, with annual sales in excess of £8 billion and more than 200,000 employees, has also seen good results from Cisco AVS. The company collects processes and delivers 82 million items to 27 million addresses each day and is using the product to accelerate its customer-facing web applications.

“Deployment of the Cisco AVS solution has helped to improve average performance of our externally facing web applications,” said Shankaradhas Tharmananthar, eBusiness technology manager, Royal Mail UK. “Our aim is to provide a customer experience through our external web presence that is consistent with our customers’ perception of our services, for which the application acceleration capabilities from Cisco form a key part of our solution.”

TSI, a leading global supplier of precision measurement instruments and environmental services with more than 800 employees worldwide, deployed Cisco WAE with WAFS at its UK facility to accelerate application traffic to and from its headquarters in the United States. TSI plans to expand its Cisco WAE deployment to multiple sites through Europe and Asia in the next few months.

“The WAFS component of the Cisco WAE has saved TSI money by reducing the amount of gear deployed at each site and has increased productivity by reducing the amount of equipment support we need at each site,” said Phil St. Ores, director of information technology at TSI. “With Cisco WAFS, we’ve been able to centralize our servers, eliminate the need for domain controllers at remote sites and do away with time-consuming and redundant backup systems. It’s a great product that we will continue to deploy globally.”

With increasingly connected business models and processes putting significant pressure on IT departments to expand business and application reach while reducing cost, IT departments must ensure timely and highly secure access to applications and information, regardless of user location. As IT organizations evolve to consolidated data center architectures, they need end-to-end solutions to ensure business continuity and enhance productivity by dramatically increasing application performance and decreasing the cost of delivering IT services on the WAN to branch and remote users.

Application Velocity System (AVS): Dramatic Web-based Application Acceleration for Datacenters The new Cisco AVS product family, which includes the Cisco AVS 3120 and Cisco AVS 3180 appliances, accelerates, monitors and secures web-based application delivery to all remote users across the extended enterprise without requiring changes to clients or servers. Deployed in the data center, Cisco AVS accelerates and optimizes any HTML or XML-based application over HTTP or HTTPS, resulting in response time improvements of as much as 500 percent, bandwidth requirement decreases of as much as 80 percent and reduction of server processing cycles by as much as 80 percent.

The Cisco AVS 3120 allows remote users accessing web-based application and portals such as Oracle, Siebel, and SAP across the WAN to get LAN-like application response times. It does this by applying innovative technology to offload specific server processes and minimize the communication overhead required to render pages in these applications. Unlike any other acceleration solution, these techniques can minimize application chattiness by managing user sessions and optimizing data transfers in the background. Cisco AVS features an advanced application security firewall to maximize the ability to quickly identify and prevent application layer threats and data theft.

To help ensure seamless integration with existing network and application deployments, Cisco AVS 3180 features end-to-end monitoring and reporting for application response time network-wide. By reporting on response times individually specific to the network, servers and desktops, Cisco AVS 3180 enables IT organizations to easily identify problem areas and present service-level data for ongoing management.
Wide-area Application Engine (WAE): Improved Application Response Across Branches

The Cisco WAE, the next generation multi-service branch office platform, allows organizations to reduce costs, enhance productivity and improve disaster recovery capabilities by consolidating their distributed servers and storage into centrally managed data centers while maintaining LAN-like performance and access to applications and content for users in remote branch offices. It offers application acceleration and wide-area network optimization while maintaining full traffic visibility and complying with packet network policies such as traffic prioritization, quality of service (QoS) and security settings. It further includes best-in-class caching and application protocol optimization to overcome the bandwidth and latency limitations associated with TCP/IP and client-server protocols.

This initial release features the Cisco Wide Area File Services (WAFS) and Cisco Application and Content Networking System (ACNS) running on a family of appliances that include the Cisco WAE-511, WAE-611, and WAE-7326 that transparently integrate and interoperate with Cisco networking products and IOS technology. Cisco WAE is also offered as a network module for the Cisco integrated services routers.

“The Cisco AVS and WAE are just the beginning of a growing family of products through which Cisco is redefining accelerated application delivery,” said George Kurian, vice-president and general manager of the Application Delivery Business Unit at Cisco. “Cisco is committed to continuing to deliver end-to-end application networking solutions based on advanced technologies to address increasing customer requirements for application performance, visibility and security over their extended network infrastructures.”

Cisco AVS and Cisco WAE are available immediately. Cisco AVS 3120 is priced at $34,995; Cisco AVS 3180 management station is priced at $14,995. Pricing for Cisco WAE begins at $5,500.

For more information, please visit the Cisco Systems web site at http://www.cisco.com/go/avs or http://www.cisco.com/go/wae.

About Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

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