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Cisco Application Delivery Solutions Ease Back-to-School Challenges for College Students, Faculty
Brandeis University and Harper College Deploy Cisco ACE in the Data Center to Improve Application Availability, Performance and Security During Peak Season
| Source: Cisco Systems, Inc.
SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - September 13, 2007) - Cisco® (NASDAQ : CSCO ) today announced that
the Cisco® Application Control Engine (ACE) module, a member of the Cisco
family of Data Center 3.0 solutions, has been deployed at leading
higher-education institutions to consolidate and virtualize data center
resources, and to enable faster application delivery to students,
administrators and faculty.
Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and Harper College in Palatine,
Ill., have selected Cisco ACE running on the Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series
Switch to consolidate servers and network infrastructure in their data
centers, and to improve application performance and security.
The institutions are relying on Cisco ACE this fall to help with enterprise
application delivery to faculty and students, as well as application
acceleration and security for online and distance learning.
Brandeis University: Embracing Cisco ACE to Help Change the Education Model
According to John Turner, Director of Network Systems for Brandeis
University, the school turned to Cisco ACE to help manage its online course
management application, Moodle, an open-source solution that helps
educators create effective online learning communities and PeopleSoft
applications. "We want to provide a virtual online learning environment
using collaboration tools such as virtual classes, student chat rooms,
wikis, and podcasts that augments and extends the classroom experience, and
that changes the dynamics of teaching and learning at the university," says
Turner. "With more than 5,000 students as well as our faculty accessing our
data center databases during peak back-to-school season, we need to manage
an average of 300,000 database transactions per day. ACE helps us manage
this load by enhancing application availability and providing security."
Brandeis is using the virtualization capabilities of Cisco ACE to manage
resources and security policies for its applications. "We selected Cisco
ACE for its virtualization capabilities, as well as XML configuration
management interface and availability," says Turner. "These capabilities
ease our IT management challenges, as we can better manage traffic across
multiple servers and deploy applications within minutes, in normal business
hours, without disruption to our user communities."
ACE virtualization provides Brandeis the flexibility to allocate resources
to virtual devices in any way needed. "Since Cisco ACE virtual devices have
security and are isolated from each other, we have separated our
production, test, and training environments using ACE virtual devices,"
adds Turner.
With Cisco ACE, IT staff are better able to optimize use of networking
hardware, since the university environment demands balancing extreme
traffic load variations, which peaks with the back-to-school season. "Cisco
ACE combines application security, load balancing, server virtualization
and performance in one device, all backed with the reliability of the Cisco
Catalyst 6500," says Turner. "This is a
forward-looking solution that truly integrates application delivery within
the network infrastructure."
Harper College: Using ACE for Server Virtualization and Security
At Harper College, a community college located in the suburb of Palatine,
Illinois, a northwest suburb of Chicago, Cisco ACE is helping with
back-to-school registration and a broad range of additional requirements.
According to John McManus, Manager of Servers and Networks Group at Harper
College, the ability to maximize the availability, performance and security
of the college's data center applications played a large part in the
decision to upgrade to Cisco ACE. Because the IT team at Harper runs
virtual machines on their servers, the product's unique virtualized
architecture, which enables IT managers to configure up to 250 individual
virtual devices on a single ACE module, was the deciding factor in the
technology selection.
The Cisco ACE module will manage application delivery through Oracle Portal
for administrators and faculty, including email, departmental-level
Web-based applications, and enterprise databases for campus-wide and
departmental information access retrieval.
"We've connected VMware servers to the Cisco ACE to virtualize our
application deployment," says McManus. "Initially, we were concerned about
having multiple VLANs [virtual local area networks] belonging to a
different device. But ACE has security and gives us the ability to place
virtual machines in whatever context we desire. We now have all the
application switching capabilities we could hope for plus end-to-end
virtualization support in one chassis."
The Cisco ACE integrated-security features such as the ability to add
firewall capabilities and secure-socket layer (SSL) acceleration, was a key
factor in the move to ACE. "The ability to put 10 firewalls into the one
device was compelling," says McManus. "The Cisco ACE firewall features give
us the ability to inspect the traffic without having to install 10 separate
routers externally to the chassis. The fact that we can monitor all of that
in one place was equally appealing."
Cisco ACE: Comprehensive Application Delivery Solution
The Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) family, the next-generation
application delivery solution for the data center, includes highly
scalable application-switching modules for Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series
enterprise-class switches and for Cisco 7600 Series carrier-class routers.
The ACE module helps enterprises accomplish four key IT objectives for
application delivery: 1) maximize application availability; 2) accelerate
application performance; 3) secure the data center and critical business
applications; and 4) consolidate data center resources into fewer servers,
load balancers and data-center firewalls. ACE also provides administrators
new levels of control -- including the ability to define 250 unique virtual
devices on a single physical module with security that are isolated from
each other -- for deploying, securing and accelerating critical
applications across the extended enterprise.
The Cisco ACE family also includes the Cisco ACE XML Gateway solution. This
standalone appliance extends the core ACE functionality to XML and Web
Services.
To support data center availability, the Cisco ACE application delivery
solution is integrated with the Cisco ACE Global Site Selector (GSS). ACE
GSS provides global load balancing with intelligent failover between data
centers to enable business continuity, full DNS support, as well as
protection from denial of service attacks.
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