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  5. Cisco's Unified Network Services Embeds Security, Optimization In The Network: Page 2 of 2
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Cisco's Unified Network Services Embeds Security, Optimization In The Network: Page 2 of 2

As part of Cisco's Data Center Business Advantage, the company is announcing two virtual services products, the Virtual Security Gateway (VSG), originally announced at VMworld 2010, and virtual Wide Area Application Services (vWAAS). VSG and vWAAS are Cisco's first offerings that provide application services embedded in the virtual network. They are tightly coupled to individual virtual machines through a policy-based management framework that can be applied to both virtual machines in the loca
September 14, 2010

Each tenant requires at  least one VSG assigned to it. The tenant's VSG keeps tenants separate and makes traffic decisions based on the policies defined by the VNMC. The policies are applied by the individual Nexus 1000v virtual switches, which are by nature multi-tenant. The multi-tenant feature can support most business requirements.

Cisco's virtual Wide Area Application Services (vWAAS) is a virtual instance of Cisco's WAAS product that performs application delivery functions such as compression, caching and data deduplication. While Cisco is claiming the first cloud WAN optimizer, I think that claim goes to Expand Networks, which announced is Virtual Accelerator in 2009. vWAAS functions munch like its physical counterpart: it remains in the data path between the client and server to optimize connections based on application policies. vWAAS can even take advantage of the local SAN to store cached objects and byte patterns, much like the appliance does with local storage.

Unlike the VSG, vWAAS doesn't require a Nexus 1000v, but when one is present, you gain the benefit of transparently redirecting traffic to the proper vWAAS. Otherwise, you will need to redirect traffic to the vWAAS using traditional methods such as Cisco's Web Cache Control Protocol (WCCP) or policy-based routing (PBR), both of which forward traffic to be optimized to the vWAAS while traffic that doesn't need optimization is unaffected. The Nexus 1000v integration is another redirection option. Alternatively, you can put the vWAAS virtually in-line, but then all traffic is processed by the vWAAS appliance.

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