Enterprise and service provider data centers face increasing business pressures to improve the reliability, security, and quality of applications while reducing costs. Typically, disparate departments deploy and manage applications, deploying a variety of different point products to address application delivery requirements.

This uncoordinated approach to application delivery infrastructure ends up increasing costs, compromising reliability, and complicating security and compliance management. IT departments need a way to more easily manage, secure, and improve application services across the extended enterprise.

The Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) delivers scalability, availability, application acceleration, breakthrough application security, and a way to simplify the application infrastructure overall at a single point in the network. The ACE provides server load balancing (SLB), application firewall, and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) offload functions.

Key benefits of the ACE include:

• Centralized control for IT over the deployment and management of application services, while allowing individual groups to administer their own application instances: Virtual partitions, plus role-based access control, workflow management, and rollback capability, help simplify management and reduce costs.
• Industry-leading application and device performance: 16-Gbps throughput and 345,000 sustained connection setups per second to handle large-scale operations plus unique WAN latency and bandwidth reduction capabilities help drive optimal end-user response times across the network.
• Rich levels of application and network security: Includes bidirectional support for content inspection, SSL encryption/decryption, and transaction logging for application security forensics.

IT organizations are tasked with two conflicting challenges. The first challenge is to provide acceptable service levels for applications, content, and data for all users throughout the globally distributed enterprise. The second challenge is to simplify and consolidate the infrastructure to minimize costs associated with procurement, management, and data protection in branch and remote offices.

Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) helps to bridge the gap between centralized and decentralized infrastructures by providing the tools necessary to ensure high performance access to a centralized pool of resources. The Cisco WAAS software, running on the Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) family of network modules and appliances, incorporates application acceleration and WAN optimization techniques, including compression, redundancy elimination, transport optimizations, caching, and content distribution. These techniques help overcome the bandwidth, throughput, and latency limitations associated with TCP/IP and application protocols.

Unlike other WAN optimization solutions, WAAS integrates transparently with the network, preserving TCP information to maintain functions such as security, QoS, visibility, and monitoring. WAAS is easy to deploy and manage, and integrates with Cisco IOS Software.

Cisco WAAS applies optimizations at three separate layers:

• Latency and bandwidth reduction at Layer 7 using application-specific optimizations that suppress unnecessary messages, perform message and operation batching, and employ sophisticated caching techniques to minimize data transfers across the WAN.
• Bandwidth and throughput improvement at Layer 4 using techniques such as Data Redundancy Elimination (DRE), LZ Compression, and Transport Flow Optimization (TFO) based on extended TCP standards.
• Transparent network integration at Layers 3 and 4, allowing WAAS to take advantage of traffic classification, QoS, policy-based routing, high availability, load balancing, and other network policies.