Cisco WAAS Delivers Breakthrough Innovations as a part of the Cisco Data Center 3.0 Initiative

Software as a service and cloud computing offer greater IT flexibility and potential cost savings but place more of a burden on the WAN, as the applications are more distributed. This impacts application performance and creates a challenge for IT organizations that are focused on providing a good user experience and improving end user productivity. This situation not only impacts users in the branch offices, but also the growing number of mobile workers and home workers.

As WAN & application optimization vendors evolve their products to solve these issues, Cisco WAAS stands out through its systems approach to enabling cloud offerings and tight integration with the network and the data center infrastructure. Cisco WAAS accelerates applications and data over the WAN, optimizes bandwidth, empowers cloud computing, and provides local hosting of branch IT services, all with industry-leading network integration.

On June 30, at Cisco Live! the release of Cisco WAAS 4.2 will be announced as a key component of our Data Center 3.0 launch delivering key innovations in the areas of service agility with on-demand deployment, higher efficiency with cloud-optimized applications and IT cost reduction with expanded Microsoft Windows application hosting and greater resiliency with in-line clustering. Visit the WAAS team at the Cisco Data Center booth to learn about the latest WAAS features and see the demos and get your questions answered.

Highlights of the Cisco WAAS 4.2 Release


Service Agility - Cisco WAAS 4.2 offers service agility through an entirely new way to deploy WAN optimization: as an on-demand, software download. This flexibility lowers the barriers for our customers to deploy this mission critical service, and is delivered with the Services-Ready Engine service module of Cisco second-generation Integrated Services Routers.

Cloud Computing - Cisco WAAS 4.2 innovations address customer’s leading concerns about cloud computing – performance and security, while simultaneously reducing the management burden, and cost risk, of a commitment to cloud computing through new auto-configuration features and SaaS optimizations and additions that provide Webex optimization on the ASR Webex SPA as well as HTTP/s traffic optimization.

Network Services - Cisco WAAS 4.2 innovations extends the consolidation, cost savings and flexibility value propositions of Windows on WAAS that Cisco pioneered in 2008, with the ability to host applications in the branch office. Now customers can run Windows applications – not just services – directly on the network via WAAS virtual blade technology. This capability has received Microsoft SVVP validation for Win2K8/R2.

SaaS Optimization - Cisco WAAS mobile 3.5 was introduced with capabilities for public cloud based application acceleration including the ability to remote deploy it as a software only to Amazon EC2 and other platforms providing acceleration for SaaS applications.

With these innovations Cisco WAAS enhances the ability of IT departments to centralize and consolidate data centers while maintaining productivity for branch-office and mobile users. To learn more about the features and capabilities of the WAAS 4.2 release visit the Cisco WAAS Software Page.