Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is technology developed by

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

that optimizes the performance of any TCP-based application operating in a wide area network (WAN) environment while preserving and strengthening branch security. WAAS combines

WAN optimization WAN optimization is a collection of techniques for improving data transfer across wide area networks (WANs). In 2008, the WAN optimization market was estimated to be $1 billion, and was to grow to $4.4 billion by 2014 according to Gartner, a techn ...

, acceleration of TCP-based applications, and Cisco's Wide Area File Services (WAFS) in a single appliance or blade. It is Cisco's attempt to keep WAN optimization residing firmly in the router, eliminating the need to deploy acceleration appliances throughout the infrastructure. The technology preserves TCP information within the network while offering the performance benefits that come along with using WAN optimization technology.

appliances have traditionally limited IT when it comes to maintaining functions such as security,

quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...

, visibility, and monitoring end-to-end transactions because they tend to cause problems for most

network monitoring Network monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, SMS or other alarms) in case of outages or other trouble. Network monitorin ...

devices and tools. By design, WAN Optimization “confuses” performance monitoring systems by changing packet header data.Tracking the optimized WAN
/ref> Latest Release
Cisco's latest WAAS software release, announced at the 2007 Cisco Networkers conference, is the industry's first solution for both end-to-end monitoring and acceleration of application traffic.

Notes

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References

* http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5680/Products_Sub_Category_Home.html * http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2007/ndc4/061807-cisco-app-optimization.html?nlhtc=0618ciscoalert1& * http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0281495.htm

Wide area networks Network performance Cisco products