SAN JOSE, Calif. – October 5, 2011 – With the rapidly increasing number of Internet-based applications, Cisco is focusing on helping its customers deliver more Web-based software applications and rich media content across networks at scale and with high quality to any user and device. To achieve this goal, the company today introduced the next generation of its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) appliances - the Cisco family of WAN (wide area network) optimization solutions.

The new Cisco WAASappliances help customers improve application performance for bandwidth-heavy applications such as virtual desktops, cloud services, video and mobile devices at branch locations. The new appliances also help organizations substantially improve the user experience across their entire network infrastructure by providing up to five times the bandwidth and supporting up to three times the users than the previous generation.

As an example of the greater scalability of Cisco’s new WAN optimization line, a single new appliance can allow an organization of 150,000 employees to simultaneously use virtual desktops over Apple iPad or other tablets, while delivering the highest possible user experience to each one. A WAAS appliance can also reduce the time it takes to download a typical PowerPoint presentation to any tablet of any user in any branch office from 30 seconds to only one second, and also has the ability to simultaneously stream 400 high-definition videos to 150,000 employee devices.

These second-generation WAN optimization solutions improve IT efficiency and cut total cost of ownership by lowering an organization’s bandwidth usage and reducing the amount of hardware previously required by 66 percent. They offer a consistent, flexible deployment model that avoids network redesigns and provides IT managers with greater visibility to optimize network resources and ensure a consistent end-user experience.

Announcement Highlights

Cisco WAAS Appliances

• The new Cisco WAAS appliances support both branch and data center deployments: new Cisco 294, 594, and 694 appliances enable branch offices to deploy up to eight virtual services such as video, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and Windows on WAAS, with five times the throughput. 
• The new Cisco 694, 7541, 7571, and 8541 appliances provide large branch offices and data centers with the industry’s most scalable 10GE-capable WAN optimization solution. 
• These new Cisco appliances along with the router-integrated, on-demand WAAS on the Cisco Integrated Services Router Generation 2 provide organizations with the most comprehensive WAN Optimization portfolio in the industry. The ISR G2 family of routers provides a borderless workspace experience through service virtualization, video-ready capabilities, and operational excellence. 
• The new Cisco appliances are managed via the Cisco WAAS central manager and support integrated reporting.
• All products are now available.

New Cisco WAAS Software

• Cisco is also announcing Cisco WAAS v4.4 software, which brings together application and network optimization with the industry’s first context-aware DRE. By adding application-intelligence to DRE (data redundancy elimination), Cisco WAAS with context-aware DRE is designed to enable customers to support a dramatically greater number of video or virtual desktop sessions from a single system, doubling the effective throughput of those systems without decreasing the overall experience to any location.

Supporting Quotes

• Dave Frampton, vice president and general manager, Cisco Application Delivery Business Unit

“Growing adoption of video, desktop virtualization and cloud often leads to application latency problems across wide area networks. Cisco WAAS improves application response times while reducing bandwidth consumption to enable enterprises to take advantage of new applications and rich media delivery without compromising employee productivity. The new Cisco WAAS appliances deliver the scale and simplified deployment to maintain user experience through these network-wide transitions. For rich media traffic such as video and virtualized desktops, the new WAAS solutions will improve throughput and performance by 2 to 3 times relative to current generation WAN optimization solutions.”

• Rohit Mehra, director, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure, IDC

 “Today’s enterprise networks are experiencing increased bandwidth-heavy applications such as video, virtual desktops and cloud services. The momentum behind this trend will only grow as cloud applications take center stage in the enterprise. WAN optimization and application delivery solutions like Cisco’s WAAS appliances provide IT and network managers with a compelling solution that scales and improves application performance across the network.”

Supporting Resources

• Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS)
• More information on the new WAAS appliances
• Visit Cisco’s Borderless Networks website
• Visit the Cisco blog, The Platform
• Follow the Cisco enterprise wireless team on Twitter and Facebook,

RSS Feed for Cisco: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/rss.html

Tags/keywords: Cisco, routing, switching, WAAS, VDI, DRE, WAN optimization, WAN acceleration, Cisco WAVE, virtual desktop, network optimization, application performance, application acceleration, application monitoring

About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate.  Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com.  For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

#  #  #

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.