Cisco Systems has announced its Content Delivery Network (CDN) system, enabling service providers to build additional value into their networks and deploy content delivery services for new profit opportunities. Enterprise and dot.com environments will also benefit from Cisco`s CDN offering, through rolling out accelerated e-business applications including e-commerce, e-learning, gaming, online communities and TV-quality streaming media for communication with employees and partners.
The Cisco CDN technology allows service providers to distribute content closer to the end-user and overcome issues such as network bandwidth availability, distance or latency obstacles, origin server scalability and congestion issues during peak usage periods. "Through the comprehensive CDN, service providers can enhance their customer`s end-user Web experience and deliver new content-based services while maintaining availability, security and minimising response times," says Bill Weber, general manager for Cisco Systems Southern Africa. "Our CDN system is designed to meet the needs of a wide spectrum of service providers including network service providers (ISP and access providers), Web, e-commerce and ASP/hosting service providers, and emerging new-world service providers (those offering applications, streaming and storage). In addition to service provider customer benefits, CDNs enable enterprises to accelerate their deployment of advanced e-business applications such as e-learning and live streaming."
Cisco`s recent acquisitions of CDN technology companies, Sightpath and Arrowpoint, have provided the building blocks for delivering a complete CDN solution. Cisco`s approach to delivering CDNs is to provide a complete product portfolio that addresses multiple network requirements and scenarios. "Our CDN solution will increase the value of our customers` networks by enabling them to offer new interoperable and profitable value-added services", says Weber. "Because we are providing the complete solution based on industry standards, service providers and their enterprise customers can quickly gain access to the accelerating CDN market opportunity - without needing to integrate disparate emerging technologies or products themselves."
Cisco`s CDN system is comprised of five technologies: content distribution and management, content routing, content edge delivery, content switching and intelligent network services.
Content distribution and management: automatically distributes content to content delivery nodes at the network edge, allowing for global provisioning with real-time monitoring. Cisco`s content distribution manager products provide centralised provisioning and policy setting for all content edge delivery nodes associated within the CDN.
Content routing: directs user requests to the CDN site for maximum scalability and reliability based on a set of real-time metrics including delay, topology, server load and a set of policies such as location of content. This enables accelerated content delivery and adaptive routing around failures and congestion. Cisco`s content router products work symbiotically with intelligent services in the network infrastructure to ensure content availability and provide global load balancing.
Content switching: intelligently loads balances traffic across delivery nodes at points-of-presence or distributed data centers based on the availability of the content, application availability and server load. Intelligent content switching adds a second layer of protection against flash crowds and ensures transaction continuity for e-commerce applications in the face of system interruptions. Intelligent content switching also enables advanced personalization and prioritisation for important content and customers.
Content edge delivery: delivers content from the network to the end user. The Cisco CDN solution allows service providers to define, and expand the edge of their network anywhere from a small number of distributed data centres near the core of the network out to the network edge, and inside the firewall of a target customer.
Intelligent network services: includes intelligent network services in the IP infrastructure such as Security, QoS, VPNs and multicast.
The Cisco CDN system integrates with existing content-aware services which are required to build scalable and highly available CDNs.
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Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. The South African office was started in late 1994, with a single office in Johannesburg and two members of staff. Growing significantly year-on-year, Cisco is now represented in all major South African centres by local offices and/or partner organisations.
The South African team offers support in sales, pre-sales, marketing and promotions as well as a pre-sales helpdesk. By breaking the team into these segments, it allows Cisco to focus on the unique requirements of each target market, so that it can ensure that it is providing its individual customers with products and services that meet their needs.
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