San Jose, Calif., August 28, 2000 - Enabling service providers to build new value into their networks and to deploy content delivery services for new profit opportunities, Cisco Systems, Inc. today announced its Content Delivery Network (CDN) system. With Cisco's comprehensive CDN system offering, service providers can enhance their customer's end user web experience and deliver new content-based services while maintaining availability, security and minimizing response times.
Setting the benchmark for deploying content-delivery infrastructures, a Cisco CDN allows service providers to distribute content closer to the end user and overcome issues such as network bandwidth availability, distance or latency obstacles, origin server scalability, and congestion issues during peak usage periods. In addition to service provider customer benefits, CDNs enable enterprises to accelerate their deployment of advanced e-business applications such as e-learning and live streaming.
Cisco's CDN system is comprised of five technologies; Content Distribution and Management, Content Routing, Content Edge Delivery, Content Switching, and Intelligent Network Services. Only Cisco delivers all five elements as an integrated solution.
"Cisco is aggressively moving into the content delivery market with a new CDN solution geared to enable network service providers to deliver CDN services as well as equipping enterprise customers to deploy their own private CDNs," said Greg Howard, Principal Analyst with The HTRC Group, LLC. "Cisco's recent acquisitions of CDN technology companies, Sightpath and Arrowpoint, have provided the building blocks for delivering a complete CDN solution."
Cisco's CDN system is designed to meet the needs of a wide spectrum of service providers including network service providers (ISP and access providers), overlay content service providers, Web, e-commerce and ASP/hosting service providers, and emerging new-world service providers (e.g., offering applications, streaming, and storage). With its building-block approach to CDNs, only Cisco can deliver service providers a comprehensive end-to-end solution or individual components that add value to the service providers existing network cache and server infrastructures.
Enterprise and dot.com environments also benefit from Cisco's CDN offering which can now roll out accelerated e-business applications including e-commerce, e-learning, gaming, online communities and TV-quality streaming media for communication with employees and partners.
"Our CDN solution will increase the value of our customers' networks by enabling them to offer new interoperable and profitable value-added services", said Krish Ramakrishnan, vice president and general manager at Cisco. "Because we are providing the complete solution based on industry standards, service providers and their enterprise customers can quickly gain access to the accelerating CDN market opportunity - without needing to integrate disparate emerging technologies or products themselves."
Cisco's CDN Portfolio
Cisco's approach to delivering CDNs is to provide a complete product portfolio that addresses multiple network requirements and scenarios. Cisco's CDN system components include:Content Distribution and Management -- Automatically distributes content to content delivery nodes at the network edge, allowing for global provisioning with real-time monitoring. Cisco's Content Distribution Manager products provide centralized provisioning and policy setting for all content edge delivery nodes associated within the CDN.
Content Routing -- Directs user requests to the CDN site for maximum scalability and reliability based on a set of real-time metrics including delay, topology, server load and a set of policies such as location of content. This enables accelerated content delivery and adaptive routing around failures and congestion. Cisco's Content Router products work symbiotically with intelligent services in the network infrastructure to ensure content availability and provide global load balancing.Content Switching -- Intelligently load balances traffic across delivery nodes at POPs (points of presence) or distributed data centers based on the availability of the content, application availability and server load. Intelligent content switching adds a second layer of protection against flash crowds and ensures transaction continuity for e-commerce applications in the face of system interruptions. Intelligent content switching also enables advanced personalization and prioritization for important content and customers.
Content Edge Delivery -- Delivers content from the network to the end user. The Cisco CDN solution allows service providers to define, and expand the edge of their network anywhere from a small number of distributed data centers near the core of the network out to the network edge, and inside the firewall of a target customer.
Intelligent Network Services -- Includes intelligent network services in the IP infrastructure such as Security, QoS, VPNs, and multicast. The Cisco CDN system integrates with existing content-aware services which are required to build scalable and highly available CDNs.
Product Specifics/Availability/Pricing
These new products complement and extend the capabilities of Cisco's CDN portfolio, offering a variety of choices that meet the diverse needs of service providers and enterprise Web initiatives. All new product additions incorporated into the CDN portfolio will be available by October, 2000 and include:Content Distribution Managers
CDM 4670- Provisioning and management appliance that supports multiple origin content providers and multiple distribution policies for provisioning and control of large multi-customer service provider CDNs. Supports static web-hosting content and is upgradeable for distributed streaming in the future.
List price $124,995
CDM 4650- Provisioning and management appliance for single content provider or enterprise CDN. Includes distribution policies for importing, previewing, and replication of video streaming and static web content. Deployed with up to 1000 Content Engines, provides rich media Intranets and Extranets that can be quickly and easily deployed in enterprise branch, co-located or outsourced facilities, or web-hosting service.
List price $94,995
List price $19,995
Content Routers
CR 4450- Provides Content Engine selection for large service provider CDNs for multiple origin web sites with POPs and Content Engines distributed across thousands of locations. Acquires routing and peering policies from the CDM 4670 and makes routing decisions based on the location of the user and POPs as well as network status and other metrics.List price $74,995
CR 4400- Provides content engine selection for small to medium CDNs with multiple origin sites and transparent insertion into edge networks and web-hosting environments for extension of CDN services from the web-hosting provider into edge ISP environments, or for creation of CDN peering services within an ISP.
List price $24,995
Content Engines
CE 7320- Content delivery appliance for larger content PoPs and co-location sites. Supports transparent/reverse-proxy caching, distributed web hosting, and content replication. Upgradeable to support streaming media.List price $89,995
CE 590/560- Content appliances for service provider content PoPs, co-location sites, and large enterprise sites. Support same features as CE 7320. Upgradeable to support streaming media.
List price CE590-$29,995, CE560-$14,995
CE 507- Content appliances for smaller PoPs, enterprise branch offices, and extranets. Offers all features available on CE 590/560. Also supports integrated streaming media services for multimedia intranets and extranets.
List price $5,495
CE 507AV- Content appliance for conference facilities, e-learning centers, and kiosks. Supports scheduled replay of streaming media with integrated audio/video output for interfacing to AV broadcast/display systems.
List price $6,995
Content Switches
The Catalyst 4840G is a compact, fixed configuration, switch featuring wire speed load balancing between Web servers. The 4840G provides the high performance required for non-stop e-commerce solutions across enterprise and service provider networks.List price $29,995
These newly announced products complement Cisco's previously announced and shipping content networking products including the CSS 11000 Series Content Switches and the Catalyst 6500 Series Switches, and Distributed Director and Local Director appliances.