Wide Area Networking

Transformation of the Enterprise

A change is occurring in the enterprise business model. The global scope of the enterprise is increasing, with many large enterprises now supporting worldwide, 24-hour operations. New types of content-rich applications are being deployed, as well as real-time collaborative services that incorporate voice and video. And with an increasingly mobile workforce, as well as the need to provide secure access to business partners and contractors, the traditional domain boundaries of the network are also beginning to shift. Nowhere in the network are these changes felt more acutely than on the WAN edge. As a result, the typical requirements placed on a WAN edge aggregation router have expanded. Formerly, the WAN edge router was seen as a place in the network where speed and scalability were the main criteria for success. Progressively, the role of the enterprise WAN edge router has evolved into a consolidated focal point for rich services such as voice, multimedia, and real-time collaboration and commerce. Increasingly, network designers, system administrators, and IT staff are being challenged to provide more sophisticated services at the WAN edge with greater levels of resiliency, security, and application intelligence.

Solving the WAN Edge Puzzle

One approach that some network architects have considered is a design that incorporates multiple single-function, high-performance network appliances. Although this approach can resolve many of the challenges cited previously, ultimately it becomes a question of economics and manageability, because this model leads to:

• Increased training, testing, deployment, and integration overhead

• Additional real estate and power requirements

• Duplicate hardware and software maintenance and support costs

• Further expenditures for hardware redundancy and sparing

• Supplier management complexities with multiple WAN devices

• Operational inconsistency and service interoperability problems

To address these complex network challenges, Cisco has taken a different approach-one based on an in-depth understanding of customers' business and technology requirements. The Cisco WAN edge solution is a component of a comprehensive approach to the enterprise network, which is captured in a series of network blueprints. These blueprints for customer success are based on the concept that different portions of the network play decidedly different roles in an overall end-to-end architecture. Collectively, the series of blueprints comprise a model known as the Cisco "Places in the Network" (PIN) architecture.