Cisco has introduced new products and services across all functional elements of its Borderless Network architecture. The new products extend Cisco’s Borderless Networks portfolio to address the growing need for high-performance, highly reliable and highly secure application delivery from a smaller number of consolidated data centers to a growing number of wired and wireless endpoints, while optimizing overall resource utilization and footprint.

“IT managers want to use the network to support the needs of the business. But the business is changing, and IT managers are under increasing pressure to make the network available to anyone, anywhere, anytime and on any device — in a highly secure, reliable, seamless manner. This is precisely the challenge that the Cisco Borderless Network was designed to address. This third expansion of the Borderless Networks portfolio is designed to help customers reach new levels of innovation and participation by engaging their customers and employees to create entirely new ways of doing business,” said Brett Galloway, senior vice president, Wireless, Security & Routing Technology Group, Cisco.

High-Performance and High-Density Innovations

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series switch, the industry’s most widely deployed modular platform, raises the bar in performance for campus switching by delivering 848Gbps of system bandwidth and 384 Power over Ethernet Plus ports. With the new Supervisor Engine 7-E, the Catalyst 4500E also drives the transition from 1G Fiber to 10G Fiber with 100 ports at 10G. Fully loaded with hardware-accelerated Borderless Network Services like Cisco Medianet, Cisco EnergyWise, and Cisco TrustSec, it is now powered by Cisco IOS XE software, enabling the delivery of third-party services. The Catalyst 4500E delivers best-in-class access resiliency with sub-10-millisecond supervisor failover utilizing the In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) functionality and enriched application visibility with Cisco IOS Flexible NetFlow. The new switch can provide investment protection with backward and forward compatibility.

The Cisco ASA 5585-X Adaptive Security Appliance delivers MultiScale performance in a compact, two-rack-unit form factor. The ASA 5585-X provides new levels of speed and scale, supporting 20Gbps of multiprotocol throughput and 35Gbps of large packet throughput of maximum firewall performance, 10,000 VPN connections, 350,000 connections per second and 8 million total connections. It also features industry-leading threat defense from Intrusion Prevention System and always-on remote access using Cisco AnyConnect. Ideal for mission-critical data centers, it provides a security system that sets the bar for performance with eight times the performance density of its competitors.

The Cisco ASR 1001 router is the industry’s most compact edge routing solution at one rack unit, and the highest-performance router for its size. It delivers up to 5Gbps performance throughput, enabling deployment agility in high-end enterprise branch, WAN edge and managed services environments. The Cisco ASR 1001 supports an on-demand performance upgrade from 2.5Gbps to 5Gbps as well as incremental services on-demand.

The Cisco Aironet 1040 Series Access Point expands Cisco’s mobility portfolio and accelerates the adoption of 802.11n by providing enterprise performance with an entry-level price, reduced operational complexity and a competitive feature set.

End-User Security and Energy-Saving Enhancements

Cisco AnyConnect 3.0 further expands network endpoint capabilities with new IPsec IKEv2 support in addition to Secure Sockets Layer and Datagram Transport Layer Security, an integrated 802.1X supplicant, and 802.1AE MACSec support. This new release of AnyConnect also supports hybrid secure mobility deployments by extending protection to mobile workers through ScanSafe cloud security services as well as on-premises Web security appliances.

Cisco EnergyWise can deliver even more cost savings by rapidly growing Cisco Developer Network partnerships. This broadens the reach of EnergyWise to include clientless devices like printers, copy machines and digital media displays, managed at the plug level. It also monitors the power usage for all the devices in the data center racks.

CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution 4.0 simplifies monitoring and troubleshooting the network. It also provides a comprehensive and fully integrated management tool with intuitive work centers to automate workflows and ease deployment for Borderless Network services such as Cisco EnergyWise and Cisco TrustSec.