Our 2013 IT Impact Survey highlighted the importance of collaboration between business leaders and IT as trends like BYOD, data center consolidation and Cloud applications put more pressure on the network. Why collaborate? The survey highlighted that 34% of application roll outs over the prior 12 months were delayed because of not enough budget. You would think that if applications were a priority IT would be given sufficient budget to make sure the network was ready to handle the extra traffic. Unfortunately, according to Nemertes, most organizations’ WAN budgets will remain flat or decline in 2015, meaning that adding bandwidth is often not an option for IT. So how can you do more with less?
I really don’t envy the Cisco ISR team. It is really tough to be a leader and still out perform yourselves on a consistent basis. One could argue there is nowhere to go but down. I think is cool that TechWiseTV has been around long enough to chronicle the changes over time. Heck, many of our favorite engineers have been around the entire time as well..that gives us the unique ability to tell a story that can both respect and hopefully contrast the evolution in an appreciative way.
We recently had a chance to showcase the new ISR 4000 Series. ISR remains the acronym for this family as it stands in for ‘Integrated Services Router.’ I am sure we made this argument before, but one way to characterize this one is to see just how much the innovation swings towards the ‘I’ and the ’S’ these days. It makes sense. There is only so much one can do from a pure routing perspective, especially if you consider that speeds and feeds will grow naturally with the rest of the market and nobody pays the Cisco premium for just keeping up with the Joneses.
Today, at Interop in New York, we are introducing to our customers and partners four new platforms that extend what we started with the award winning architecture of the Cisco ISR 4451 into a complete family of Cisco 4000 Series of Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) designed and priced for all branch offices sizes and needs. The full family represents the greatest advancement in branch routing technology in the past ten years and promises to help IT deliver an uncompromised application experience for any user over any connection, with reliability and security.
With today’s announcement every branch of every size can benefit from the ISR 4000 Series architecture. We are excited to help IT deliver new services and improve application experience at the same time as streamlining branch infrastructure and reducing management and WAN costs. The five models that make up the family are the ISR 4451, 4431, 4351, 4331, and 4321. With this simplified portfolio (5 models vs 10 in ISR G2), we will cover WAN needs from 50Mbps all the way up to 2Gbps all with rich network services and a common management platform.
Over 1,200 customers have already adopted this new branch architecture to help meet next-generation demands like mobility and cloud. One of these customers is a large school district in the United States digitizing education with tools like eLearning, eBooks, and HD video. These initiatives could saturate bandwidth and potentially ruin the ability of students to download books while others watch live video or download OS updates. By deploying the ISR 4451 the school district was able to use our Akamai Connect capability to cache eBooks locally, off-loading enormous traffic from the WAN since the each eBook was now stored locally! Leveraging the ISR 4000 has helped the school district move forward with a truly digital learning experience. Read More »
This week Cisco announced an entirely new approach to delivering rich services to the Enterprise branch office with the introduction of the ISR 4000 Series. For those folks paying attention over the last year this really was no shock. In fact the ISR 4451 announced at Cisco Live 2013 is the first member of this new series teasing the concepts and technologies represented today in an entire portfolio of platforms.
The ISR 4000 Series consists of 5 platforms that spread the architecture and technology introduced with the 4451 across a portfolio designed to meet the needs of most branch offices. With performance-on-demand, these 5 platforms hit 10 different performance levels, from 50Mbps to 2Gbps with services, giving IT departments the capability to pay for only the capacity they need with the option to increase performance with a simple license. The multi-core control/data/services plane CPUs with included virtualization through Service Containers, server replacement capabilities with the UCS E-Series and flat performance-curve with services are truly revolutionary in the industry, so how did we get here? Read More »
With the growing influx of new mobile devices, connected things, bandwidth intensive applications and more data, the network is more relevant to business success than ever before. Back in June of 2012, Cisco saw that we needed to move away from multiple network systems loosely linked together to an agile and simple infrastructure, streamlined policy and centralized management would be needed to support new business demands. We called it Cisco Unified Access and we aligned the solution to three pillars: One Network, One Policy and One Management.
For the last few years, we have focused on delivering new products and functionality under this Unified Access model. Below is a timeline of products released as part of the Unified Access framework. Cisco lead the way in delivering gigabit 802.11ac Wi-Fi., converged wireless control in access switches and through the acquisition of Meraki – a complete cloud-managed network solution.
The timeline above doesn’t represent every feature and function we have delivered, but it shows Cisco’s commitment to this Unified Access model, both from a cloud-managed and on-premise solution perspective.
Today, Cisco is announcing a number of new products and new functionality to existing products that will help mobilize the workforce, secure the business and increase IT agility. The announcement includes the following: Read More »
