LiveAction 4.1, shipped in late August, provides additional Cisco IWAN management features available with PfRv3 release, announced in July for ISR and ASR platforms. As Cisco’s preferred management solution for IWAN, LiveAction makes troubleshooting of performance routing issues easier through at-a-glance visual dashboards and simple workflows.

LiveAction 4.1 leverages the scalability enhancements provided in version 4.0 and adds several important functions allowing enterprises to take advantage of improved intelligent path control for Cisco Intelligent WAN and large-scale configuration and change management functions.  LiveAction 4.1 features provide the following customer benefits:

• More robust PfRv3 dashboard and workflows enabling faster troubleshooting
• PfR configuration and provisioning via Net LineDancer (NetLD) integration
• 5X faster report processing than LiveAction 3.0
• Full NCCM functions through integration with NetLD
• Device grouping allowing common operations across multiple devices with ease
• Easier to deploy device configurations to multi-vendor platforms
• No more restrictions on single admin login and flexibility in Active Directory login

Read More »

Tags: asr 1000, CSR 1000V, ISR 4000, IWAN, LiveAction, PfR

Cisco Intelligent WAN or IWAN is a solution from Cisco to optimize and better utilize your branch WAN connectivity. It addresses several aspects of WAN concerns like cost, security and application experience.  There are many challenges that IT is facing today in the enterprise world and I would like to address the top three in this blog post.

Read More »

Tags: #IWANWed, AVC, IWAN, PfR

“Location, Location, Location” is what you need to keep in mind for real estate in the physical world.  But in today’s
enterprise environment where everything is virtual and many critical apps are in  the data center or cloud, the most important thing is connectivity.

So welcome to the era of connectivity, connectivity, connectivity!

As connectivity is so important, what can we do to ensure the uptime of the branch WAN connectivity without increasing costs?

Read More »

Tags: Intelligent WAN, ISR, IWAN, MPLA, performance routing, PfR

Food for thought

The other day, I went to the café to grab my lunch and notice something that got me thinking of an IT problem we’re going to see more and more.

I’m not a soccer sport fan but of course I am aware of the 2014 FIFA World Cup™ event that is happening.

Anyways, I saw a guy watching a live stream of the game between Iran and Nigeria on his mobile device and it got me thinking “I wonder how much bandwidth this thing is taking?”

All major sports event like the Superbowl, World Cup, NBA Finals, PGA tour, Olympics, etc. are streaming LIVE games and many people around the globe are watching the World Cup during business hours as its always 9 to 5 somewhere. Read More »

Tags: application experience, AVC, bandwidth, IWAN, mpls, online streaming, optimization, PfR, video, world cup

In my last blog I talked about the value of Pfr to the IWAN solution. This week I wanted to talk about DMVPN and why it is going to be a critical component of your IWAN deployment.

Your IWAN topology will most likely consist of one or more internet connections which means that your data will be traveling over untrusted connections and shared environments so security is going to be top of mind. So how do you secure your data over the internet and other untrusted or shared environments? Well DMVPN (Dynamic Multi-point Virtual Private Network) is based on VPN the same technology that many of you use today to securely connect back to your office when you are traveling or working from home. A VPN will create a tunnel between two end-points and then encrypt all data traveling over the tunnel. VPN’s can connect users to a remote site, client-to-site VPN, or connect two remote sites, site-to-site VPN. Unlike VPN, DMVPN can securely connect multiple points together dynamically.

So how does DMVPN work and what is the benefit to IWAN?  DMVPN works on top of your WAN infrastructure which means that DMVPN tunnels will be established between branch sites as traffic flow demands. In a common hub and spoke topology example, when data needs to be sent from the spoke to the hub site, the spoke will establish a VPN tunnel to the hub by registering first with the hub.  In order for each tunnel to function a new dynamic IP address is created at the branch since the hub site will initiate the connection. In order for data to be routed between sites over the DMVPN tunnels, routing information will need to be exchanged. As more tunnels are created there will be more dynamically created IP addresses and traditional routing protocols like BGP or EIGRP are used to efficiently share routing information so all sites can talk to each other. Lastly QoS is applied to each tunnel to ensure that the hub site does not oversubscribe the spoke sites.

Read More »

Tags: Cisco ISR, DMVPN, IWAN, PfR