Cisco Systems Inc. is revamping its router portfolio to meet a number of new networking trends. According to company representatives, the refresh speaks to the ever-present (and frankly frustrating) call on the IT department to do more with less.
Whereas CIOs are tapped more often these days to consider customer relationships and other strategic business aspects, and video applications, mobile apps, and other new technologies take hold in many enterprises (adding to network management requirements and traffic monitoring), budget constraints still keep IT departments from adding to their staffing ranks, although they really could use the extra help.
“That paints the picture of why something has to change,” says Joel Conover, senior manager of solutions marketing.
No surprise, Cisco says technology is the answer. The San Jose network-technology juggernaut is introducing a “Borderless Network” architecture designed to simplify network-service deployments across the enterprise.
Supporting this new infrastructure is the revamped Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) G2 portfolio of data-sending products – the 800, 1900, 2900 and 3900 series devices. According to the company, the next-generation equipment features a decoupled hardware/ software architecture – the software no longer resides in physical modules, as it did in the previous generation. Instead, the software lives with Cisco, and end-user organizations call up the software up as a service, as required.
Services include audio conferencing and unified communications, up to 1 TB of video storage, WAN optimization and application acceleration, and network security. The routers sport a Services-Ready Engine that Cisco says rolls out the selected services, saving IT departments from having to physically visit branch offices to install modules on the branch equipment.
