Brochure
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The emergence of new business applications and a new communication paradigm has caused an
unprecedented increase in bandwidth and scalability requirements for the WAN.
Enterprises involved in data center consolidation need increased WAN performance and reliability to
provide consistent experiences to their branch-office employees and remote locations.
Older infrastructure cannot support high-bandwidth WAN aggregation and Internet edge applications.
For Ethernet WAN services, enterprise customers are looking for a small-form-factor, high-performance
router to provide services at multigigabit Ethernet speeds.
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Highly available WAN infrastructure: Enterprises need to provide continuous, uninterrupted access to
applications and services over the WAN. This provision requires a more highly available, resilient, and
adaptive infrastructure than they have today. Customers need their WAN edge infrastructure to support:
Rapid failover without service disruption
Streamlined change management and service turn-up without WAN disruption—and with fewer errors
Increased system redundancy at the platform level
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Full WAN security for data protection and compliance: Businesses need to satisfy industry regulations
regarding data privacy, and adhere to regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Payment Card
Industry (PCI), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), etc. Customers need their WAN
edge infrastructure to:
Deliver network resiliency with a self-defending architecture
Secure all critical business and client information without creating a performance bottleneck
Integrate and embed security services within the network to reduce the need for standalone devices
Inspect traffic flows at high speeds for attack prevention, policy enforcement, and application security
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Consistent service delivery with application intelligence: Enterprises need to meet demanding internal
service-level agreements (SLAs), with improved service delivery and application performance over the WAN.
To accomplish this level of service, customers need their WAN edge infrastructure to:
Fulfill internal SLAs while containing WAN and telecom expenses
Speed service and feature deployment to quickly adapt to changing network requirements
Provide advanced services that interoperate with critical network functions to ensure application
performance and security
Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers are an innovative new line of Cisco routers designed to address the emerging
needs of the Cisco Unified WAN Services edge. While combining the best attributes of existing Cisco routers, the
Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers deliver a resilient and secure next-generation WAN infrastructure, with powerful
performance and scalability for embedded services.
Service Consolidation Without Compromise
Traditionally, the network architect’s dilemma has always been to achieve the service richness required at the WAN
edge without making difficult trade-offs regarding speed, scalability, and complexity. Layering multiple services on a
single platform often resulted in high CPU usage and decreased packet throughput. Taking the alternate approach--
distributing service functions to a set of discreet appliances--has further drawbacks in terms of increased operational
and training costs, software maintenance expenses, integration and testing challenges, and higher total cost of
ownership (TCO).
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers fundamentally change this equation. By consolidating network services within a
single high-performance, resilient, service-rich platform, the network architect attains many tangible benefits. These
