Cisco steps up its WAN optimization game

Cisco Tuesday is set to introduce a product suite that couples the company's Wide-Area File Services and content distribution technologies with optimization features to deliver an integrated feature set that tackles application performance over the WAN and at branch offices.

Cisco Wide-Area Application Services (WAAS) combines the company's existing Wide-Area Application Engines (WAE) and integrated network modules running Cisco WAFS and Cisco Application and Content Networking System (ACNS) software. Cisco acquired its WAFS technology with Actona back in 2004, and incorporated other technologies (TCP and HTTP optimization, delta-based caching and compression) from various groups within Cisco. According to Cisco, WAAS will offer enterprise network managers responsible for multiple branch offices "the benefits of centralized infrastructure and simple remote access to applications, storage and content."

The WAAS technology is software delivered on a variety of data center and branch office appliances: the WAE-7326 for data centers and the WAE-612, WAE-512 and NM-WAE for branch offices. The company also designed WAAS to fit into existing Cisco gear.

Cisco earlier this year announced its Application Control Engine (ACE), which is a blade that resides in a switch deployed between a server and the WAN to speed application delivery. Now WAAS includes the NM-WAE module, a product that fits into Cisco's 2800 and 3800 Integrated Services Routers (ISR). WAAS products plug in to the network - with devices installed symmetrically at the data center and in the branch office to enable technologies such as compression - and can be configured with various administrative and access rights for IT managers, depending on their job description, Cisco says.

WAAS is Cisco's foray into the bustling WAN optimization market, which includes competition from the likes of Expand Networks, F5 Networks, Juniper Networks, Riverbed and more. Protocol optimizations, caching, content distribution, and streaming media technologies are among the features Cisco baked into WAAS. Ideally, Cisco says the technology will allow customers to consolidate distributed servers and storage into centrally managed data centers, while also taking advantage of existing Cisco infrastructure.

"It is significant because Cisco is finally entering the market with a product that appears to be very competitive. From a feature set standpoint, Cisco has done a good job," says Joe Skorupa, a research vice president at Gartner. "The competition has been out long enough that Cisco could see what others were doing and pick and choose the best features and approaches from across the enterprise competitive spectrum and incorporate those into the WAAS."

Cisco, which industry watchers say has been holding back for some time in the WAN optimization market, may have bided its time accurately. Early reviews indicate WAAS could provide the feature-rich product set customers will be looking for as WAN optimization buyers move from best-of-breed point products into second-generation technologies.