Enterprises and Governments around the world increasingly depend on mission-critical applications for vital business functions. Some examples of these applications include order-entry, transaction processing, customer service, and billing. In addition, emerging next-generation applications like IP telephony and instant messaging offer unparalleled efficiency, flexibility, and ease.

The IP-centric nature of these applications requires a High Availability Network. Outages prevent access to critical applications and can have a significant impact on productivity and profitability.

Cisco offers a comprehensive solution to High Availability Networking (HAN) that minimizes network outages and ensures non-stop access to the most mission-critical applications. Cisco HAN takes a network-wide approach, delivering the most cohesive and collaborative solution to maintain high network availability. It combines:

• Reinforced Network Infrastructure
• Real World Network Design
• Realigned Network Operations
• Real-Time Network Management
• Relentless Network Support

Cisco's History of Leadership in High Availability Networking:

• First implementation of Non-Stop Forwarding with Stateful Switchover
• First Router (Cisco 12000) with zero packet loss when failing over from one Route Processor to another.
• Invented the Hot Standby Router Protocol and the Gateway Load Balancing Protocol for first-hop redundancy.
• Only Technical Assistance Center with the knowledge base, tools, documentation, and online communities to resolve 78% of all cases online without having to first talk to an engineer.
• Optimized the OSPF, BGP, and IS-IS Routing Protocols with enhancements to significantly lower convergence times.
• Pioneered the Port Aggregation Group Protocol to bundle ports into an Etherchannel, led to IEEE LACP.
• Pioneered Spanning Tree Protocol extensions with innovations like Portfast, Uplinkfast, and Backbonefast to minimize convergence times. Led to IEEE 802.1w and 802.1s.
• Only Stackable Ethernet switch (Catalyst 3750) to support 1:N redundancy.
• Only System with hitless In-Service HW and SW upgrades and fault isolation by process/subsystem/service
• Only self healing Operating System for multi-shelf Carrier Infrastructure (CRS)