Cisco announced new products and services across all the functional elements of its Borderless Network architecture — the switching, routing, security and wireless portfolios. Notable additions include the highest-performing and high-density Cisco® Catalyst® switch, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance firewall and compact Cisco ASR 1000 Series router in their classes; new entry-level 802.11n wireless access points for smaller businesses; and new and enhanced smart-services offerings.

Additionally, Cisco announced the Application Velocity Network Service, a new network service that accelerates application performance physically and virtually. For more information on the Application Velocity Network Service announcement, click here.

Key Highlights:

The new products and professional and technical services Cisco announced today extend the company’s Borderless Networks portfolio to address the growing need for high-performance, highly reliable and highly secure application delivery from a smaller number of consolidated data centers to a growing number of wired and wireless endpoints, while optimizing overall resource utilization and footprint.

High-Performance and High-Density Innovations:

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series switch, the industry’s most widely deployed modular platform, raises the bar in performance for campus switching by delivering 848 gigabits per second of system bandwidth and the highest density of 384 Power over Ethernet Plus (PoEP)-capable ports. With the new Supervisor Engine 7-E, the Catalyst 4500E also drives market transitions from 1G Fiber to 10G Fiber as a price/performance aggregation switch with 100 ports at 10G. Fully loaded with hardware-accelerated Borderless Network Services like Cisco Medianet, Cisco EnergyWise, and Cisco TrustSec, it is now powered by Cisco IOS® XE Software, enabling the delivery of third-party services. The Catalyst 4500E delivers best-in-class access resiliency with sub-10-millisecond supervisor failover utilizing the In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) functionality and enriched application visibility with Cisco IOS Flexible NetFlow. The new switch can provide investment protection with backward and forward compatibility.

The Cisco ASA 5585-X Adaptive Security Appliance delivers MultiScale performance in a compact two-rack-unit form factor. The ASA 5585-X provides new levels of speed and scale, supporting 20 Gbps of multiprotocol throughput and 35Gbps of large packet throughput of maximum firewall performance, 10,000 VPN connections, 350,000 connections per second and 8 million total connections, along with industry-leading threat defense from Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and always-on remote access using Cisco AnyConnect. Ideal for mission-critical data centers, it provides a security system that sets the bar for performance with eight times the performance density of its competitors.

The Cisco ASR 1001 router is the industry’s most compact edge routing solution at one rack unit and the highest-performance router for its size. It delivers up to 5Gbps performance throughput with services turned on, enabling deployment agility in high-end enterprise branch, WAN edge and managed services environments. The Cisco ASR 1001 supports an on-demand performance upgrade from 2.5Gbps to 5Gbps as well as incremental services on-demand.

The Cisco Aironet® 1040 Series Access Point expands Cisco’s mobility portfolio and accelerates the adoption of 802.11n by providing enterprise performance with an entry-level price, reduced operational complexity and a competitive feature set.

Cisco is also announcing new and enhanced smart services to help customers realize the full value of their network investments. The new Cisco Smart Net Total Care Service, which scales to large enterprises, provides IT professionals the unique ability to see exactly what is going on in their networks, allowing them to increase operational efficiency, reduce risk, and lower support costs on a proactive basis. For mid-market customers, Cisco is significantly expanding the scope of Smart Care, which combines complementary strengths of Cisco Services and its certified partners, to cover more products and much larger networks, and deliver proactive, network-level support.