Cisco adds cloud capabilities to UCS, WAAS line

LAS VEGAS, USA: In a move to increase the efficiency and security of cloud-based networks, telecom networking equipment vendor Cisco announced several updates to its Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), Wide Area Application Service (WAAS) line of WAN optimization tools, and IronPort Email Security offerings, at Cisco Live event.

Soni Jiandani, senior vice president, Server Access Virtualization Technology Group, Cisco, said: "We aimed to create the ideal, programmable, platform for virtualized and cloud environments with integrated networking and management, flexible and scalable enough to handle any workload."

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Cisco expanded networking capabilities of its UCS with new fabric interconnects, a new Virtual Interface Card, and a new chassis I/O module.

The company says that these new features will extend the agility, scalability and performance of UCS-based data centres and cloud environments, allowing businesses to improve application performance and handle workload bursts by doubling bandwidth to the chassis, quadrupling bandwidth to the server, and reducing end-to-end latency by 40 per cent.

Cisco introduced a new UCS Manager, which according to the company will manage all system configuration and operations for both UCS blade servers and rack-mount servers and provides an open application programming interface (API) for integration with other management software.

Cisco will be also introducing VMware vCenter on UCS and UCS Express on Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISRs).

For its WAAS product line, Cisco introduced context-aware data redundancy elimination (DRE) feature, which as per the company will improve application response time and throughput by changing DRE caching behaviour on a per-application and per-branch office basis.

WAAS also comes equipped with a Central Manager interface, which can manage up to 2,000 WAAS instances from a single interface, and integrated Application Performance Manager (APM), which provide network administrators visibility into application performance and network utilization.

Cloud also introduced new Cisco Cloud Security solutions, Cisco IronPort Outbreak Filters, and Cisco IronPort Business-class email security in to its e-mail security offering.

"Virtualization, performance, and security are three of the most fundamental requirements for building and using clouds," said Lew Tucker, chief technology officer, cloud computing, Cisco. "As the number and diversity of clouds grows, meeting these requirements through a common, unifying platform -- in other words, the network -- will help organizations from all industries communicate and access information more dynamically and securely, both within their own clouds and with other clouds that are relevant to their needs."