Feature Story

April 10, 2006

Software applications are the lifeblood of businesses. Applications, connected to databases of information, are the founts of knowledge that drive business commerce. But now businesses and their employees demand access to these applications at anytime, anywhere, and from any device. It can be much harder to send information across the globe than across the office. Organizations are often finding that their applications simply don't work as fast or as dependable as they would like. To address this challenge, Cisco has developed Application Networking Services, a new type of technology that uses the ubiquity of the network to help drive applications performance from anywhere and at anytime. News@Cisco recently spoke with Cisco's George Kurian, vice president and general manager for application delivery business unit, about Application Networking Services and how this new technology will help businesses expand the potential of their applications and information.

What is Application Networking Services?

George Kurian: Application Networking Services is Cisco's term for network-based technology that improves the way applications communicate across networks. Applications, just to be clear, are any of the software programs that provide information. Corporations these days rely on applications to run almost every aspect of their operations, from human resources and accounting to manufacturing and marketing. And anytime someone buys a product from the Internet, they are accessing an application - or several applications - to view the products and make the purchase. Additionally, applications are typically accessed by users over communications networks, such as the Internet or private business networks

Our Application Networking Services, or ANS, technology help applications run faster, perform more dependably, and be better protected. Just as importantly, it helps applications more easily "scale" to handle rapid increases in the number of people who might want to access the information provided by that application. ANS is what Cisco terms an "advanced technology." An advanced technology is any networking technology Cisco believes has the potential to generate more than $1 billion in revenue for the company. So we feel pretty strongly that this (Application Networking Services) is something our customers are looking for.

How does Application Networking Services help applications work better?

George Kurian: The key to ANS is that it is network-based. The network is really the foundation for the communications between a user and the application. This makes it the perfect place to boost the performance of applications, assist them in their functions, and protect them from attackers. This is really a logical step for Cisco and a natural evolution of the network.

Our routers and switches, which control the flow of data on a network, use their computing resources to direct the best paths for data to get from point A to point B. But these routers and switches are getting smarter all the time. Now, for example, they can look at a packet of information and see that it is for a phone call or a video broadcast and give it priority over other packets. We call this quality of services, or QoS, and it ensures that those types of communications will run smoothly. This is basically the same idea with ANS. As a flow of information for a certain type of application passes through one of our routers or switches, the devices can recognize that the flow is for application "X." Then with ANS, businesses can program that router - with set policies - to provide various types of assistance to deliver the application. For example, the policy could tell the ANS engine in the router to give the application top priority, to route the flow to a different location or another server, to send it to another application, or to notify a manager about where and how the flow is traveling. It's about providing businesses with more control over their applications' communications rather than having to hope that everything will work out okay.

What business issues does Application Networking Services address?

George Kurian: As software applications have become more important to businesses, they have become more complex. They are victims of their own success in a way. There are not only more and more users trying to access applications but increasingly businesses use more and more different types of applications to meet their requirements. And with the advent of the Internet, the growth of mobile technologies, and globalization, employees need to access applications from a vastly greater variety of locations. Companies worldwide spend billions of dollars buying or building their business applications. But if employees, customers, or partners have to struggle to use an application because it runs too slowly or is undependable to access, then that lowers the return on investment companies make in their applications, as well as hamstrings the company from reaching its goals. So ANS addresses this basic business challenge of getting key information to employees no matter where they are.

Many companies have created technologies to address the issues surrounding application performance. How does Cisco's Advanced Networking Services offer something different?

George Kurian: The key is the network. Unlike other approaches to this problem, which have been software or server based, Cisco's approach is grounded in the network. Application performance is really about how applications interact with different parts of a network - how they respond to various users and devices, how they travel over different types of network structures, and how they communicate with other applications or computing resources, such as storage devices or database engines. The one common denominator in all of that is the network. It can "see" the application along its entire route, serving as a shepherd of sorts to guide information on its travels. And the network connects to all those different parts that the application must deal with. So the network serves as the perfect intermediary to these processes.

Our recently announced Application Control Engine (ACE) is a great example of what I'm talking about. ACE is a multi-function service module that companies can easily plug into our Catalyst 6500 switch - which is the world's most successful data center network switch - to drive application performance across their enterprise. Without getting into too much technical detail, the ACE module performs some of the functions of servers - the computers that applications run on - to drive stronger application performance, securely. Why is that significant? Because of the way a switch is designed, its location in the network, and its hardware component. A switch or router can carry out these tasks much more quickly than a server. And by taking on those tasks, it frees the computing power of the server for work on other tasks, in essence boosting that server's performance. According to our initial tests, the ACE module as part of our complete ANS solution can boost the response times of e-commerce type applications by as much as 500 percent while reducing bandwidth requirements by as much as 80 percent. So either way you slice it, the ACE module is delivering productivity boosts and costs reductions. We know our customers like these kinds of products.

Certainly, Application Network Services is no silver bullet or panacea. Each application, each company, each network has its own particular requirements. The problems are complex, but Cisco believes the network can provide significant help to these technological and business challenges. And as a company with a long history of supporting open standards, we will very much work to build products that interoperate with other technologies that assist applications. Our customers really don't care how we do it. They just want their applications to run better. So we're taking our knowledge of networking and applying it to the task.