SAN DIEGO – The head of Cisco Systems Inc. took the stage here at the company’s annual conference for engineers to crow a little bit about the overhaul it has gone through in the past year.
“With a little bit of luck,” CEO John Chambers said, Cisco has been able to set new priorities for products and largely maintain the company’s lead in most network infrastructure categories.
In routing Cisco had the biggest market share gain in its history, he said, and has 20 per cent market share in blade servers in North America.
“Thank you for your confidence,” he said to the IT managers, network engineers, CIOs and CEOs in the audience of 17,000 in the hall and tens of thousands watching online.
Before he started his keynote, Cisco announced new products and solutions aimed at making cloud computing safer across wide area networks.
The three-part Cisco Cloud Connected Solution includes
–what the company calls Cloud Connectors, software embedded into Cisco’s Integrated Services Router G2 platform for branches, with services said to improve the performance of cloud applications. Service providers and solution providers will be able develop apps to sell differentiated services to customers;
— on the infrastructure side, the Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000v, a new virtual router that allows organizations to extend virtual private networks into the cloud. It will be available in the fourth quarter.
There’s also a new Aggregation Services Router, the ASR 1002-X (to ship in September), and server modules for the ISR G2, which allows the hosting of multiple services on a branch platform.
—capabilities added to existing WAN optimization platforms to better support cloud computing. These include Application Visibility and Control (AVC) technology integrated into the ISR and ASR platforms, and what Cisco calls AppNav technology, which it says intelligently clusters Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) physical and virtual appliances into a single resource pool managed by a central controller.
Zeus Kerravala, principle analyst at ZK Research, said the package will help help organizations optimize connectivity to and from the cloud.
