Purpose-built for the Intelligent WAN. The new ISR 4000 Series

Today, at Interop in New York, we are introducing to our customers and partners four new platforms that extend what we started with the award winning architecture of the Cisco ISR 4451 into a complete family of Cisco 4000 Series of Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) designed and priced for all branch offices sizes and needs. The full family represents the greatest advancement in branch routing technology in the past ten years and promises to help IT deliver an uncompromised application experience for any user over any connection, with reliability and security.

With today’s announcement every branch of every size can benefit from the ISR 4000 Series architecture. We are excited to help IT deliver new services and improve application experience at the same time as streamlining branch infrastructure and reducing management and WAN costs. The five models that make up the family are the ISR 4451, 4431, 4351, 4331, and 4321. With this simplified portfolio (5 models vs 10 in ISR G2), we will cover WAN needs from 50Mbps all the way up to 2Gbps all with rich network services and a common management platform.

Over 1,200 customers have already adopted this new branch architecture to help meet next-generation demands like mobility and cloud. One of these customers is a large school district in the United States digitizing education with tools like eLearning, eBooks, and HD video. These initiatives could saturate bandwidth and potentially ruin the ability of students to download books while others watch live video or download OS updates. By deploying the ISR 4451 the school district was able to use our Akamai Connect capability to cache eBooks locally, off-loading enormous traffic from the WAN since the each eBook was now stored locally! Leveraging the ISR 4000 has helped the school district move forward with a truly digital learning experience.

Line-of-Business Goals are Increasing Demands on IT

We all know demands continue to increase on IT, but there are three big demands that we hear over and over again from our customers that are essential to support where the line-of-business wants to go:

An application centric approach is essential across the enterprise, from the data center to the WAN. IT will increasingly be asked to deliver not just network SLAs, but application SLAs that include availability, performance and security of all applications whether they are located in the data center, public Cloud or elsewhere.

Transport options of Internet and cellular are available in ways they haven’t been in the past. Internet has become significantly more reliable in the last couple of years, and is often the fastest way to significantly increase bandwidth. 4G is a step-change from 3G, enabling cellular as a full-featured secondary WAN or even primary WAN for the first time.

Finally, new business models are changing the role of the WAN itself. Students are taking tests online, not with paper and pencil. Retail stores are helping their guests access catalogs on mobile devices, not just asking questions. Organizations of all types are leveraging HD video.

The Cisco ISR 4000: Do More…for Less

Based on my early conversations with ISR 4451 customers, it was awesome to hear the excitement about the value they saw the architecture could bring. Beyond performance, Cisco has delivered a number of unique differentiators:

Separate data, control, and services planes in a multi-core architecture for performance and reliability, even with rich network services

Virtualized service containers to enable network applications to run natively

Performance-on-demand to remotely enable performance doubling or tripling

Intelligent Path Selection powered by Performance Routing v3  (PfRv3) with simple centralized configuration for application policies

Akamai Connect with intelligent caching and WAN offload right on the platform

Sourcefire IDS and Cisco Cloud Web Security to secure direct Internet access

Together, the new ISR 4000 Series gives our customers the powerful capabilities they need for today and tomorrow.

To learn more about the ISR 4000 Series visit http://www.cisco.com/go/isr4000 or register for our upcoming Cisco TechwiseTV episode, where technical experts do a dive deep into the architecture and respond to your questions.

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