The San Jose, California-based networking vendor will announce two appliances using FineGround’s Layer-7 acceleration technology, the Application Velocity System 3120 and 3180. Dante Malagrino, senior marketing manager for data center solutions for Cisco in EMEA, said the devices are designed to sit in a data center and accelerate both HTTP and HTTPS traffic.
Cisco is claiming a halving of response times, an 80% decrease in bandwidth requirements per web app, and, since the boxes offload functionality from servers, a concomitant 80% reduction in CPU cycle.
It refers to the two devices as the only data center appliance(s) to control and optimize at Layer-7. However, other acceleration players such as Juniper (with the technology acquired with RedLine), F5 (the Pivia technology), and Citrix (NetScaler), might be at odds with that description.
The other announcement is of the Wide-Area Application Engine, WAE, a combination of the Actona WAFS technology for accelerating the storage file systems CIFS and NFS, and Cisco’s own application and content networking Software, SCNS, for caching, streaming, and content delivery.
Whereas app acceleration is an asymmetrical technology (it requires only a box at head end, the data center), WAFS is symmetrical, involving boxes at the head and receiving end to carry out translation into and out of a more efficient, proprietary protocol for the transport over the WAN.
Consequently, there is a data center box, the WAE-7326, and a branch office one, the WAE-511, with an interim device, the WAE-611, which can actually sit at either end, depending on the size of the organization and the volume of traffic going over the WAN. Of course, Cisco had already launched the Actona technology as standalone boxes at the end of 2004, but the bundling with ACNS represents an enhancement to the offering.
Equally significant is the launch of the WAFS and ACNS technologies bundled into network modules for slotting into its Integrated Services Router, ISR, the box designed to be the platform for all Cisco’s technology offerings (routing, security, acceleration/optimization, VoIP) in branch offices and SME.
There are also two products here, the NM-40 and NM-80. The idea is to minimize the number of boxes in a branch office while maximizing the functionality of what is there by adding modules. Currently the only other vendor following a similar strategy is the start-up NetD, which says it can add functionality without impacting those already running, whereas Cisco requires a reboot of its IOS operating system to make additions. The difference here is that Cisco has a market reach start-ups like NetD can only dream of.
