Cisco Launches New Solutions for Data Center

Cisco Systems (www.cisco.com) announced the availability of new solutions for data center and branch deployment designed to optimize application performance, ease infrastructure consolidation and improve end-user productivity, enabling remote users to get LAN-like application response times over the WAN.

The new products include the Cisco Application Velocity System (AVS), a family of application acceleration, security and monitoring appliances for the data center, and the Cisco Wide-area Application Engine (WAE), a family of appliances designed to accelerate application delivery and provide file and rich media access to branch offices.

Hy-Vee, one of the top 30 privately-owned companies in the United States, with sales of more than $4.6 billion in 2004 and more than 200 retail stores across seven Midwestern states, has been using the technology from FineGround upon which Cisco AVS is based for more than three years. FineGround was acquired by Cisco in June this year.

"Hy-Vee has used FineGround's Condenser product (now Cisco AVS) in conjunction with our Plumtree portal for three years with excellent results," said Brad Styve, Systems Analyst, Hy-Vee, Inc. "Use of this technology to accelerate our Hy-VeeNet portal to users over the WAN reduces HTML traffic by as much as 90 percent and reduces overall frame relay bandwidth usage by 40 percent. This not only gives our users a better overall experience by speeding page delivery, it also lowers costs by decreasing the need for higher speed frame relay connections at our stores."

Royal Mail Group, plc, a public limited company wholly owned by the UK Government, with annual sales in excess of £8 billion and more than 200,000 employees, has also seen good results from Cisco AVS. The company collects processes and delivers 82 million items to 27 million addresses each day and is using the product to accelerate its customer-facing web applications.

TSI, a leading global supplier of precision measurement instruments and environmental services with more than 800 employees worldwide, deployed Cisco WAE with WAFS at its UK facility to accelerate application traffic to and from its headquarters in the United States.

"The WAFS component of the Cisco WAE has saved TSI money by reducing the amount of gear deployed at each site and has increased productivity by reducing the amount of equipment support we need at each site," said Phil St. Ores, director of information technology at TSI.

With increasingly connected business models and processes putting significant pressure on IT departments to expand business and application reach while reducing cost, IT departments must ensure timely and highly secure access to applications and information, regardless of user location.

Application Velocity System (AVS): Dramatic Web-based Application Acceleration for Datacenters The new Cisco AVS product family, which includes the Cisco AVS 3120 and Cisco AVS 3180 appliances, accelerates, monitors and secures web-based application delivery to all remote users across the extended enterprise without requiring changes to clients or servers.

The Cisco AVS 3120 allows remote users accessing web-based application and portals such as Oracle, Siebel, and SAP across the WAN to get LAN-like application response times. It does this by applying innovative technology to offload specific server processes and minimize the communication overhead required to render pages in these applications.

The Cisco WAE, the next generation multi-service branch office platform, allows organizations to reduce costs, enhance productivity and improve disaster recovery capabilities by consolidating their distributed servers and storage into centrally managed data centers while maintaining LAN-like performance and access to applications and content for users in remote branch offices.

This initial release features the Cisco Wide Area File Services (WAFS) and Cisco Application and Content Networking System (ACNS) running on a family of appliances that include the Cisco WAE-511, WAE-611, and WAE-7326 that transparently integrate and interoperate with Cisco networking products and IOS technology.