Comments on: Why Cisco, Not Juniper? OpEx, CapEx and the Frankenkluge in the Branch Office Closet

By: Why Cisco not Juniper - TechStop

Why Cisco not Juniper - TechStop — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 02:24:42 +0000

[...] http://blogs.cisco.com/borderless/why-ci… [...]

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By: master99

master99 — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:14:08 +0000

talking bout indian food, hmmm… am loving it.. hahaha

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By: Prashanth Shenoy

Prashanth Shenoy — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:35:48 +0000

Hi Rahmani,
Thanks for your comments. This blog was specifically focused on our enterprise routers and not switches.

For more information on your switches – http://www.cisco.com/go/switches

For our industrial switches (Catalyst 2955 and the IE Series switches) – http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/products.html#N4AA79C .

Cheers,
Prashanth

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By: Prashanth Shenoy

Prashanth Shenoy — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:28:39 +0000

Hi Heath,
Thanks for your comments. Based on several customer discussion we’ve had over the past few years, the requirements for a branch office router vary greatly from vertical to vertical and across different geographies. As a example, bandwidth is still a primary concern and expensive in parts of LATAM and Asia. So the need for an integrated bandwidth optimizer without all the bells and whistles of a complete WAN Opt solution is a very relevant solution to these customers. WAAS Express (a bandwidth optimization solutions integrated into our IOS and available across both fixed and modular ISR G2) is one such solution that has got a lot of traction precisely for this situation.

3g/4g wireless is another use case where companies who are setting up temporary sites or remote branch offices where fiber / ethernet is hard to find use their SP certified 3G/4G HWIC card on the ISR G2 for either primary or backup WAN connection. And having unified access – wired and wireless – gives you the deployment flexibility, policy consistency across different type of devices and users.

Having all these integrated in a single box gives you a tremendous amount of operational efficiency – lower real estate, power required, single maintanence contract (Cisco SMARTNET services), interoperability between key features – apply QoS and optimize video/data traffic with integrated WAAS before you go over your 3g/4g WWAN without needing 3 boxes to do that at the same performance.

Of course, for high availability you can have two ISRs multi-homing to different carriers/ISPs but without the need to do the same for your WAN Opt, UC appliances (benefits of integration).

Cheers,
Prashanth

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By: Heath

Heath — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:52:33 +0000

Interesting blog… I do like the fact that we are able to put all of these services on a G2 ISR, but to be honest most branches don’t need that many services.. Remote Access is usually centralized, IPS is not “really” needed at the branch level, WAAS – Bandwidth is too cheap to send money on that technology. I do see Voice, VPN and FW – but a 3945 at a branch… A little overkill I’d say.

Branches these days also redundancy – so there is nothing wrong with distributing services across two boxes and using them to failover each other.

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By: Prashanth Shenoy

Prashanth Shenoy — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:32:16 +0000

Hi Brad,
Maybe we are looking at different things, but the video featured on the site ( http://youtu.be/35qnouOazDI ) has over 85,000 hits in just a few
weeks — that seems to show quite a bit of life to me.

Thanks for reading,

Cheers,
Prashanth

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By: Brad Reese

Brad Reese — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:53:02 +0000

Hi Prashanth,

I’m looking at the visitor traffic to Cisco’s website reference link:

overpromisesunderdelivers.net

I mean, it appears Cisco will need to implement “LIFE SUPPORT” fast in order to keep this website from being pronounced DEAD:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/overpromisesunderdelivers.net/

Prashanth, any thoughts about the death spiral of this Cisco website?

My own website has died many times, but since I’m NOT the mighty Cisco, what gives?

Sincerely,

Brad Reese

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By: Prashanth Shenoy

Prashanth Shenoy — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:55:15 +0000

Thanks for your comments, KoolAid.
Please see the reply below I gave to Patrick on some of the reasons why we strongly believe in the integrated services approach.
As for running all these on a single device, we’ve come a long way from the days of 1600,2600,3600 access routers to the ISR G2 of today where the horse power, memory, and the architecture of these boxes make it viable to run multiple services at once without stressing the platform. And this is even true for our WAN/Internet Edge platforms like the ASR 1K where the multi-core QFP (quantum flow processor) lets us provide line rate performance on some key security (like Firewall) and routing services needed at the edge while providing multi-gig performance for CPU intensive features like deep packet inspection (NBAR), IPsec encryption etc.

Your comment “there is really nothing that separates Cisco from a Juniper, Brocade, or HP” will need me to write a separate blog outlining our differentiators. But to start off with, this blog was specifically addressing our integrated services approach for our enterprise routers – the ISR and ASR product lines – and some of the vendors you mention don’t even have a respectable play in this space and other vendors who have routing products in the enterprise space are still trying to play catch up to our ISR and ASR platforms when it comes to feature richness in security, wireless (WLAN and WWAN (3G/4G), application performance (with features like citrix-ready WAN optimization integrated in our ISR), UC, virtualization services (with UCS Express on ISR) etc.

As for our overall architectural approach, our integrated strategy and the TCO benefits, I would encourage you to read the
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns1015/white_paper_c11-687149.pdf

Benefits of our Borderless Networks (per Forrester study)
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns1015/bn_TEIstudy.pdf

Benefits of an Integrated Application Acceleration Approach (as per the Forrester study):
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns1015/forrester_network_fabric.pdf

For a whole list of other material on this topic:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns1015/benefits.html

All the best for your CCIE!

Cheers!

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By: Prashanth Shenoy

Prashanth Shenoy — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:32:07 +0000

Hi Patrick,
Thanks for your comments. The blog, video, and the white paper weren’t meant to bash any vendors. It was to focus a fundamental difference between how Cisco approaches our enterprise routing strategy and products we develop vs other vendors. We, here at Cisco, have had the integrated services approach as a corner stone for our ISR and ASR product lines. With cloud services, BYOD etc getting more prominent , having security, UC, wireless, and WAN optimization integrated and working seamless in your branch and WAN infrastructure is becoming more and more important. We hear this repeatedly from our customers at EBCs, customer advisory boards, and events. The opex savings due to reduced maintanence, real estate, contract expense, downtime etc and capex savings due to reduced number of devices have made it even more attractive for our customers to embrace this integrated approach. We have 12million of these ISRs and 500K+ global customers who have deployed them successfully so far. So that should say something about the validity of our approach.

As for the industry expert comment – we’ve had independent tests/reviews from NetworkWorld on ASR (which won the ClearChoice aware from them), Miercom (for both ISR and ASR) etc . You can find those reports and links on our product pages.

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By: rahmani

rahmani — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:38:06 +0000

hi please send to me i about differnce information between switch cisco and industrial switch ?
kind regard
eng . rahmani

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