Cisco on Cisco

Cisco IT's data center strategy adapts to current and future business needs through resource management, business continuance, cost-effective storage area networks, enhanced data security, improved efficiency and business productivity. We divide the data center category into the following topics.

Application Networking Services
Application Networking Services (ANS) solutions bring added intelligence and speed to application traffic that flows between data center servers and clients in branch offices worldwide. ACNS-based content networking solutions provide protection at gateway routers, filtering potentially damaging traffic, as well as delivering software, videos on demand, and live streaming video across the WAN. Coupled with wide-area application services (WAAS) technology, ACNS content networking provides a cost-effective way to distribute large files or high-bandwidth streaming video content across the WAN, improving performance by bringing needed content closer to end users.

Application-oriented networking (AON) modules in the data center and branch routers provide a variety of content transformation capabilities, including protocol translation and encryption for added data center security and application security; content inspection and message logging; SOAP and XML translations to support business-to-business application integration; and more.

Data Center Architecture
A standards-based data center architecture provides the platform for optimizing application, server, and storage resources. A resilient network infrastructure should support security, availability, performance, and business continuance goals, and facilitate the adoption of new technologies such as virtualization that allow organizations to respond faster to changing business and market needs.

Storage Networking
Storage networking frees storage drives from direct connection to hosts and allows large storage resources, such as storage frames and disk arrays, to be pooled and shared among many hosts, for easier manageability and better utilization of costly storage resources. Hosts can access this pooled storage over IP networks or Fibre Channel networks.