Cisco has announced new products to its portfolio of Application Network Services (ANS) solutions that enable end-to-end Application Delivery Networks to accelerate and secure business critical applications, while dramatically improving end-user application experience and productivity. Cisco also announced application solutions testing conducted with major software vendors and additional customer support services. The new products and services mark the next milestone in Cisco's Data Center 3.0 initiative, extending the benefits of the connected enterprise to the data center.
Announcements include:
- Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) 4710 Appliance for application availability, acceleration, security and virtualization for the data center.
- Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Mobile provides Cisco WAAS application acceleration benefits to any employee regardless of location.
- Cisco ACE XML Gateway Release 5.2, a software upgrade that automates TCP to XML application traffic management to better enable Web services and reduce provisioning times.
- An extension to the Data Center Assurance Program to include testing and validation of software from key vendors, including Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, over the Cisco Application Delivery Network.
- New Cisco Application Profiling Service offered by Cisco Advanced Services that helps customers more effectively host and manage applications, while preserving performance, security and availability.
Dallas, Texas-based Affiliated Computer Services (ASC), a premier provider of global IT and business process outsourcing, has deployed both Cisco WAAS and ACE internally and also deploys Cisco ANS products at client sites, such as Scott's Miracle-Gro.
“Cisco has a broad range of application delivery networking technology that provides greater productivity to end-users and accelerates business opportunities for our company, as well as our clients,” said Tom Gibson, ACS Director of Business Development. “Our ability to rapidly and reliably deliver key applications from our data centers to a wide range of end-users, whether mobile or branch office, gives ACS and our clients a critical business advantage. Because Cisco tightly integrates application delivery capabilities into the overall network, we can more easily deploy, scale and manage application delivery as we and our clients continue to grow.”
Cisco ACE: Virtualized Application Switching and Acceleration for the Green Data Center
The Cisco ACE 4710 Appliance is a powerful new application delivery and optimization solution for today's data centers at a very attractive price point. The Cisco ACE 4710 appliance ensures business continuity by enhancing application availability, improves business productivity by accelerating applications, and reduces operating costs by minimizing data center power and cooling needs, contributing to Green Data Center initiatives.
The Cisco ACE 4710 extends the Cisco ACE family by offering a stand-alone appliance; previously ACE functionality was offered in a high-capacity module for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches and Cisco 7600 Series Routers. The new appliance is well-suited for small- and medium-scale deployments, supporting up to 2 Gbps of application traffic and up to 50 virtual devices in a single appliance. The ACE 4710 Appliance features many Cisco-patented acceleration technologies such as FlashForward, which eliminates the network delays associated with embedded Web objects such as JavaScript files – resulting in up to 500% faster Web application performance. Similar to the ACE module, various software licenses are available for the ACE 4710 Appliance to upgrade performance and scalability without having to purchase new hardware.
In addition to introducing the ACE 4710 Appliance, Cisco has upgraded the software for its ACE XML Gateway. With this solution, IT managers can leverage the network to secure and offload from servers the processing of XML transactions used in service-oriented architectures (SOA) and applications, including Web 2.0 services. With this new software release, the Cisco ACE XML Gateway provides automatic provisioning of the ACE application switch so that the two ACE products can work together for the most efficient processing of appropriate traffic types.
Cisco WAAS Mobile : Speeding Application Performance to Mobile Users
Cisco WAAS Mobile provides Cisco WAAS application acceleration benefits to any employee regardless of location, extending the capabilities of the Cisco WAAS product family. The WAAS Mobile product combines client desktop software with server-based software that resides near a VPN concentrator. The client software can be easily installed without reconfiguring existing desktop clients, file servers, or network infrastructure. It integrates with an organization's existing remote access VPN and desktop software management infrastructure, and preserves the existing security infrastructure investment in the network.
Cisco WAAS Mobile is purpose-built for Windows mobile PC environments in which the quality of public Internet connections, limited computing resources and desktop software deployment and management costs are major IT concerns. As a result, Cisco WAAS Mobile offers industry-leading performance under the most challenging network connectivity conditions with a small PC footprint, providing the lowest total cost of ownership normally associated with installation of client software on mass-user PCs.
Delivering Application Success with Customer Services and Third-Party ISV Validation
Cisco's new Data Center Application Networking development online portal validates Cisco ANS product performance with third-party enterprise applications, such as Microsoft, Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and SAP.
“Cisco's end-to-end Application Delivery Network gives customers an excellent foundation of high availability, performance, and security to successfully deploy critical Oracle applications,” said Vijay Tella, VP, Fusion Middleware Strategy, Oracle. “With validated architectures for Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and Oracle Portal, companies can rapidly and confidently extend these solutions across the globe.”
“Cisco's Application Networking solutions are a key foundation of our joint effort to help customers leverage their IT investments and transform their business,” said Jane Doe, VP Netweaver, SAP. “Our collaboration at the new SAP Co-Innovation Labs in Palo Alto , including the validation of Cisco Wide Area Application Services solution, gives customers best practices to deploy across the borderless enterprise.”
“Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 solutions are more collaborative, global, and mission critical than ever before,” said Derek Burney, General Manager SharePoint Tools & Platform. “With Cisco's end-to-end Application Delivery Network solution and Exchange Server and SharePoint Server, customers can achieve improved application performance and decreased bandwidth utilization across the network. With these technologies working together, customers can experience new levels of application access and productivity.”
To help customers deploy Application Delivery Networks, Cisco has extended its Data Center Assurance Program to provide customers with design best-practices through Cisco Validated Designs for Cisco ANS products.
Finally, Cisco is also launching new Advanced Services for Application Delivery, which gives customers the information they need to more effectively host and manage applications while preserving performance, security and availability.
Price and Availability
The Cisco ACE 4710 Appliance is currently shipping with a promotional starting price of US $15,995. The Cisco WAAS Mobile is currently shipping with a head-end concentrator price of US $5,000 and 100 concurrent user license of $34,000. Various other licenses and bundles are available for both products.
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