"We like that it's plug and play," says Armin Heinlein, corporate VP and head of IT at shipping conglomerate Panalpina Group, which has installed the Cisco ISR with a WAN optimization module at 23 branch offices. "It consolidates everything into one device and helped us get rid of remote file servers."
But Cisco's angling for bigger fish than the branch office. Its top priority after making one of its many acquisitions is usually to convert the company's technology into a module for the Catalyst 6500, its giant data center switch. Not all of these buys are obvious network services, but Cisco argues that there's little difference between a network service, such as a firewall, and an application, such as a database.
"Most network services started as applications," says Bill Ruh, VP of advanced services at Cisco. "Things have been migrating into the network for the last 10 years." In particular, network devices are good at functions that benefit from specialized silicon: An individual server might not use SSL or XML enough to justify an internal accelerator card, but an appliance can be shared. Moving functions away from servers also saves on software licensing costs, as more of the server's power can be dedicated to running a licensed app.
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Two reasons, according to Cisco. First, a lot more bandwidth. Applications running on a switch have direct access to the device's full backplane capacity--256 Gbps in the case of the Catalyst 6500, 15 Tbps for the Nexus 7000, the next-gen switch that Cisco launched last month. Second, much greater flexibility. In his keynote at Cisco's annual C-Scape conference, CEO John Chambers talked of VMs that travel around the world to run wherever power costs are lowest, perhaps sitting next to a nuclear power plant at times of low power demand or simply chasing the sun.
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