San Jose, Calif., April 10, 2001 - Cisco Systems Inc., the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, today announces availability of the industry's most comprehensive Quality of Service (QoS) Differentiated Services (DiffServ) solution. Cisco's DiffServ solution, enabled by Cisco IOS. Software, offers several management and provisioning tools to increase network scalability and manageability. These tools, including Cisco QoS Device Manager, QoS Policy Manager, Cisco Internet Performance Monitor and Cisco Service Management Solution, have been enhanced to provide enterprise and service provider customers with the flexibility to provision DiffServ across a wide range of link types, speeds, platforms and network usage scenarios.

"Cisco's DiffServ solution represents an important milestone for the future of Cisco's QoS strategy, setting the stage for more simplified provisioning and IntServ-DiffServ integration on Cisco platforms, as well as a movement towards truly powerful policy-based networking," says Tere Bracco, director of eBusiness Infrastructure, Current Analysis.

"Our DiffServ solution delivers the industry's most-comprehensive answer to the QoS challenges of multi-service and mission-critical networks," says Sangeeta Anand, senior director of product management, Cisco IOS Technologies Division. "Enterprise customers, for example, can now easily deploy QoS end-to-end while ensuring that business-critical applications are protected throughout their network. Service providers can also take advantage of Cisco's DiffServ solution to offer application-level SLAs to their enterprise customers using an IP, ATM or MPLS backbone."

Full Support for QoS Architectures

QoS is a set of techniques for efficiently managing network resources and ensuring consistent, predictable performance for business-critical applications, such as Voice over IP (VoIP), video, transaction-based and Internet traffic. Cisco IOS software supports both the Integrated Services (IntServ) and DiffServ architectures, as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), providing users with increased flexibility to deploy QoS based on their specific needs.

The IntServ model uses Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) as the standard signaling protocol to provide QoS to application flows in the network. RSVP is especially critical to perform call admission control and resource reservation for VoIP.

DiffServ, the architecture for provisioned QoS, resolves the challenge of managing application priorities end-to-end in IP networks by servicing multiple classes of traffic. Network traffic is classified at the edge and divided into different classes such as premium, gold, silver or bronze based on QoS requirements. Packets are marked based on their defined service categories and treated accordingly; for example, high-priority traffic such as voice and video is ensured low delay and jitter and an assured amount of bandwidth.

Cisco's DiffServ implementation uniquely comprises both traffic and congestion management components that color or mark data packets based on their service category and treat them appropriately with respect to delay, jitter and bandwidth guarantees. DiffServ is an integral component of Cisco's new Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)-based DiffServ-Aware Traffic Engineering and Guaranteed Bandwidth Services (see related news announcement today -- "Cisco Delivers New Technologies for MPLS Guaranteed Bandwidth Services").

Availability

The complete DiffServ solution and its value-added components are now delivered in Cisco IOS Software Release 12.1(5)T. Enterprises and service providers interested in testing or deploying Cisco DiffServ should contact their local sales office. Additional information on Cisco's QoS solutions and supported platforms can be found at www.cisco.com/go/qos.