Cisco Aggregation Services Routers Accelerate Video and Collaboration Across Hundreds of Enterprises

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Today, only eight months after the introduction of its revolutionary ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Router, Cisco announced it has significantly increased the performance and capabilities of this cutting-edge routing platform. The Cisco® ASR 1000 Series 20-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) Embedded Services Processor (ESP) doubles the service processing rate and delivers software enhancements that increase application control and performance. These latest advancements for the compact and powerful edge router further enhance its value as a single platform that combines routing and critical service features. This unique value is what has attracted hundreds of customers to adopt the ASR 1000 Series since its introduction in March 2008.

The new Cisco 20G Embedded Services Processor boosts performance to help companies successfully provide video, collaboration and security services to an increasingly global workforce in which 91 percent of employees work away from headquarters1. The doubled performance and scalability help companies build an optimally efficient wide-area network (WAN) edge, so its remote workforce can rapidly and reliably access business-critical applications with uncompromising security and network performance.

Hundreds of companies around the world are taking advantage of the multipurpose Cisco ASR 1000 Series and are benefiting from the dramatic savings in capital costs, lower operations expenses and users’ reduced carbon footprints.

NHS Lothian, the second-largest health board in Scotland, serving 1.3 million citizens in and around Edinburgh, needed a single platform to support the transfer of mission-critical business applications and data across its organization. NHS Lothian turned to the Cisco ASR 1000 to efficiently transfer its electronic patient records, patient lab results and more.

“The ASR 1000 platform, with its high-performance embedded services and security, has allowed NHS Lothian to deliver state-of-the-art medical imaging to improve the quality of health care provisioning, provide data security and, additionally, eliminate the harmful waste associated with the processing and development of traditional X-rays,” said Iain Robertson, head of information technology operations for NHS Lothian.

The Cisco Unified WAN Services portfolio helps accelerate the delivery of network services to enterprises with the following new enhancements:

* 20 Gbps Cisco ASR 1000 Series ESP High-Performance Security Services: Integrated high-performance firewall, virtual private network (VPN), and Network Access Translation (NAT) services with up to 20 Gbps throughput, up to 8 Gbps Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) encryption and up to 10,000 VPN tunnel services.
* WANOptimization (WCCPv2) Application-Aware Capabilities on the Cisco ASR 1000 Series: Enhanced network performance and dynamic optimization for business-critical applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR) is offered to help customers identify, prioritize, limit or block more than 60 applications, including Skype and instant messaging, so that compliance requirements and an optimum performance of mission-critical applications can be maintained.
* Integrated Threat Control on Cisco ASR: Rapid first line of defense against network threats with multigigabit flexible and granular Layer 2-7 Flexible Packet Matching (FPM).
* Enhancements to Cisco Security Manager: Simplified and accurate system-management capabilities for Cisco ASR 1000 platform-level instrumentation and onboard usability tools. Customers benefit from improved operational efficiencies when configuring, managing and troubleshooting network issues.

Garantibank, the third-largest private bank in Turkey, provides retail, commercial, corporate and private banking services to more than 6 million customers. With more than 13,000 employees located in its headquarters and 700 branch offices, Garantibank needed a dependable, protected platform to support both its current and future requirements.

“After upgrading our infrastructure, we had to ensure that communications over our WAN between our headquarters and branch offices, as well as with our customers, was reliable, highly secure and superior in quality,” said Ilker Sayar, network services manager for Garantibank, Turkey. “We chose the Cisco ASR 1000 Series for our WAN infrastructure for its future-proof architecture and tremendous investment protection. This platform gives us the ability to support not only our current requirements but also our vision to unify our voice, video and data networks.”

Similar to the already available 5 and 10 Gbps ESPs, the 20 Gbps Cisco ESP is also based on the innovative Cisco QuantumFlow Processor and is a centralized forwarding engine for the Cisco ASR 1004 and ASR 1006 Routers. All of these modules provide silicon- and hardware-based assistance to sustain high bandwidth and throughput even with features enabled. Performance highlights of the 20 Gbps Cisco ESP include hardware-assisted policing, encryption capability of 8 Gbps, and special jitter- and latency-minimizing multicast packet replication.

“Cisco delivers a strategic advantage for enterprises by bringing high performance, flexibility, ’instant-on’ service deployment and application intelligence at the WAN edge to advanced services such as video and telepresence,” said Stefan Dyckerhoff, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Edge Routing business unit. “Global enterprises are benefiting from the ASR 1000 Series Router’s enhanced level of security and attack prevention without having to compromise on performance.”

With the Cisco ASR 1000 Series at the WAN edge and the widely deployed Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) Series at branch offices, Cisco enables enterprise customers to meet their current and future performance and security requirements and boost operational excellence while reducing the total cost of ownership. For more information on the Cisco ASR 1000 Series, please visit www.cisco.com/go/asr; for information on the Cisco ISRs, please visit www.cisco.com/go/isr.
Pricing and Expected Availability

The Cisco Embedded Services Processor for the Cisco ASR 1000 Series is generally available now with U.S. list price of $50,000. The WAN optimization enhancements are available now at no additional cost to customers with a Cisco IOS® XE Advanced IP Services software image. The enhancements to Cisco Security Manager are scheduled to be available in March 2009 at no cost to customers with a Software Application Support (SAS) contract.
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