A New Era of WAN Design Emerges Thanks To Ciscos New Aggregation Services Router

With every IT paradigm transition comes not only increased bandwidth requirements, but an increased reliance on network services such as security, remote VPN access, QoS, and application classification to support a wide variety of corporate applications. Also new WAN services such as Metro Ethernet and 3G wireless are redefining WAN design. Between these demanding new applications and WAN options, lies the aggregation router, which has been primarily a narrowband device connecting sites via Frame Relay and MPLS, and thus has presented a bottleneck to new real-time collaboration technologies. This is all about to change, because a new era of WAN design has emerged. New router platforms are rare as their life-cycle is usually greater then a decade. So when one is announced it’s the beginning of a long industry cycle and when it’s Cisco who’s making the announcement you know that it’s an industry-changing event. Cisco has announced its Aggregation Services Router, or ASR, 1000 Series, which is focused on the high-end enterprise WAN and service provider edges. The ASR value proposition is rooted in a reduction of appliance hardware, lower WAN cost through aggregation and lower operational spend thanks to management break-throughs. Marie Hattar, Senior Director of Network Systems and Security solutions marketing at Cisco Systems is my guest as we dive into the ASR and new WAN design options it enables. To get the cost out and performance into your WAN, listen to this podcast