Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Software

PB416203

Overview

Cisco WAAS Product Description

• Deliver centralized applications with LAN-like speed to remote users while preserving visibility and branch-office security.

• Consolidate costly branch-office servers, storage, and backup infrastructure in data centers while optimizing WAN bandwidth utilization.

• Maximize regulatory compliance and data protection through consolidation of branch-office storage and acceleration of branch-office backup applications.

Secure WAN Acceleration

• Cisco WAAS offers the industry's first solution for securing accelerated traffic by preserving full firewall functions and supporting network virus scanning using Cisco IOS® Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). Cisco WAAS integrates with the Cisco family of firewall products, including Cisco IOS Software, Cisco PIX Firewall, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA), and Cisco Firewall Switching Module (FWSM), to provide full stateful firewall inspection for all traffic, including accelerated traffic. Cisco WAAS also allows Cisco IOS IPS to perform network virus scanning for accelerated traffic, preserving and enhancing the security of data in transit.

• Cisco WAAS secures all data at rest on Cisco WAAS devices using Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 197 based 256-bit Advance Encryption Standard (AES) disk encryption with automatic and centralized key management. Combined with unique features such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and integration with external authentication systems, Cisco WAAS secures data at rest on the Cisco WAAS devices against accidental or malicious compromise.

• Cisco WAAS is the only WAN optimization product being evaluated for Common Criteria Validation Scheme (CCEVS), or ISO 15408, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) 1.1 compliance.

• Other WAN optimization solutions hide traffic in opaque tunnels, bypassing standard security functions of firewalls and IPS, compromising enterprise security.

Application Performance Management Integration

• The industry's first management interface that allows performance management products to accurately report WAN optimization ROI benefits.

• NetQoS is the only network performance management vendor to provide 100-percent accurate reports on end-to-end application response time and WAN bandwidth usage, helping IT organizations to maximize WAN optimization return on investment (ROI) delivered by Cisco WAAS.

• NetQoS SuperAgent in conjunction with Cisco WAAS allows organizations to offer reliable Service Level Agreements (SLA) to end users. This protects IT organizations' current investments in monitoring tools, enabling rapid identification of network and server bottlenecks, and confident decision making with accurate end-to-end visibility.

Highest Scalability

• Industry-leading single-device scalability: Cisco WAAS introduces two new hardware platforms: the Cisco WAE-7341 and WAE-7371 Wide Area Application Engines. These offer industry-leading single-device scalability, supporting, respectively, up to 12,000 and 50,000 optimized TCP connections to minimize device rack space, power, and cooling demands in the data center.

• Industry-leading scalability without external load balancer: Cisco WAAS devices can be clustered in an active-active load-balanced configuration supporting up to 1.6 million optimized TCP connections and 32 Gbps of optimized throughput in a single cluster using Web Cache Communication Protocol (WCCP).

• Industry-leading scalability with external load balancer: Combined with Cisco load balancers such as Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) solutions, Cisco WAAS devices support 16 million optimized TCP connections and 64 Gbps of optimized throughput.

Trusted WAN Optimization

• Lowest TCO for branch office and data center

– Integration with Cisco Integrated Services Routers, which can decrease operating expenses by up to 70 percent

– Support costs that are 50 to 60 percent less than those of competitive offerings.

– Consolidation of more branch services: not just file servers, but also print servers

– Reduction of centralized file server load by up to 90 percent through advanced caching and proxy capabilities, so that fewer servers and reduced power, cooling, and space requirements are needed

• Ease of integration through network transparency

– Network-transparent tunnel-less architecture for easy integration and best compatibility with existing network services Including Quality of service (QoS), firewall, IPS, and end-to-end application response time monitoring

– Flexible deployment options: inline, out-of-band, and scalability with Cisco ACE load balancing, all supporting transparency and auto-discovery

• Reliable voice and data deployment

– Cisco WAAS integration with Cisco IOS QoS ensures reliable prioritization, bandwidth allocation, protection, and control of latency-sensitive voice traffic by providing QoS services at the WAN edge and dynamically and accurately adapting to changing WAN conditions.

– Unlike standalone WAN optimization products, the Cisco solution of Cisco WAAS plus Cisco IOS QoS offers extensive QoS mechanisms and visibility into WAN and LAN traffic, enabling reliable deployments of converged data, voice, and video traffic.

– Unlike solutions that implement limited LAN-only QoS features on WAN optimization devices, Cisco WAAS plus Cisco IOS QoS unifies a single QoS framework, eliminating the need for managing and correlating two sets of independent policies.

• Secure WAN Acceleration

– Industry's first WAN optimization solution that accelerates application delivery without compromising end-to-end security

– Designed and tested for interoperability with a variety of Cisco security solutions, including Cisco IOS Software, Cisco PIX Firewall, Cisco ASA, and Cisco FWSM, and support for stateful firewall inspection and network virus scanning of Cisco WAAS-accelerated traffic, maintaining compliance with industrywide security best practices

– Maximum protection for data at rest through advanced encryption technology

– Role-based Access Control (RBAC) for more secure management of devices by limiting administrative users to specific capabilities and domains

– Only WAN optimization solution being evaluated for Common Criteria, Validation Scheme (CCEVS), or ISO 15408, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) 1.1 compliance

Upgrade Paths

Table 1. Upgrade Paths

Availability

Ordering Information

Table 2. Ordering Information

Service and Support

For More Information