Recently, I heard a beautiful Beethoven Quartet Opus 131 piece played in an office not too far from mine. Its rhythm was so tranquil that the notes visually sang in my ears and brought up images of Ike sitting behind Cisco WAAS Central Manager listening to classical music on his headphones. (“Who is Ike?” You may ask. On the surface, Ike is your everyday IT guy that wins the girl’s heart in Ike wins with a vendor you can trust.  Behind the scene, Ike is the hero that keeps productivity high and end-user satisfied, all working together, to propel his organization ahead of the competition.)

 As I was enjoying the music, a thought ran through my mind: What does it take to be like Ike? The landscape is changing. Trends such as BYOD, VXI, Cloud and SaaS are disrupting productivity everywhere. A bunch of questions then followed: If I were Ike, how would I prepare my already optimized network for future challenges? How will I scale existing WAN opt resources and at the same time ensure optimal end-user experience and maximum investment protection?

The reality is…enabling a scalable cloud-based infrastructure is just plain difficult. That is because any solution attempting to solve such challenge must address the following:

• Accelerated application performance: optimize applications natively using validated design and standards-based security protocols.
• On-demand provisioning: agility to offer instant optimized-application services.
• Simplified operations: new WAN optimization resources (physical, virtual or a mix of both) and virtual machines should be provisioned without operational complexities.
• Virtual machine-mobility awareness: continuous availability of WAN optimization services regardless of the physical location of the application server virtual machines.
• Elastic scale-out deployment: ability to scale in different ways simultaneously and instantaneously as demand grows or diminishes.

How would Ike do it? How would Ike confront the challenges of creating a scalable cloud-based infrastructure as outlined above? (I then heard the same Opus 131 piece playing again -- and I had an epiphany.)

Ike would probably set out on a journey to Cisco Live San Diego, where he’d learn about the latest innovations on the award-winning WAN optimization solution, Cisco WAAS. Notably, the recent winner of the 2012 Best of Interop: Performance Optimization Award, Cisco AppNav, to help him design and deploy “WAN optimization at-scale.”

While there, Ike could hear about real-world deployments or take a deep dive with solution experts. If you’re attending Cisco Live San Diego on June 10-14^th, don’t miss these sessions.

WAAS 1:1 meetings:

(To schedule a meeting, please contact your Cisco account manager or the WAAS PSS/CSE team.)

 WAAS at the booth:

You can learn about WAAS at the main Cisco booth in the “Cisco Routing/WAN Optimization” section.  A WAAS 5.0 demo will feature the new iPad-ready Central Manager, AppNav, and much more.

 WAAS Technology Sessions:

(B flat! That’s it. Opus 131 was played in B flat (Bb) the second time.)

After this Ike/WAAS daydreaming, I realized I was late to my next appointment. Luckily, thanks to Cisco WAAS, my last outgoing email with a 17 MB attachment was sent in seconds, and hasta la vista I dashed out the door at warp speed.

Tags: cisco appnav, cisco live san diego, Cisco WAAS, waas, WAN Optimization