Cisco’s application architecture has shifted over the years, reflecting general trends in enterprise data centers. The first phase, which Cisco now calls Data Center 1.0, relied on centralized mainframes. In the next phase, Data Center 2.0, the pendulum swung toward a highly distributed architecture, with each branch office maintaining its own print, application, and file servers. Extreme decentralization came at a price: a proliferation of server platforms and operating systems increased capital and operational expense and complicated disaster recovery. Consolidating Cisco’s data center architecture would require overcoming two challenges. First, Cisco IT needed a way to optimize bandwidth to accommodate the increase in traffic when Cisco’s field sales offices began accessing services over the WAN instead of hosting them on their office LANs. Second, Cisco IT would need to accelerate application performance so that employees would experience LAN-like performance over the WAN.

Cisco IT found its solution for WAN optimization and application acceleration in Cisco Wide-Area Application Services (WAAS). This document describes Cisco IT’s proof of concept and development architecture for WAAS, and the challenges and business benefits realized from the WAAS deployment to date.

Read the Data Center Consolidation with WAAS IT Deployment in Progress