Cisco Cisco Application Extension Platform for SRE White Paper

White Paper

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Cisco Application eXtension Platform Overview

Audience

This document is intended for technical decision makers, architects, and application vendors who

are responsible for designing and deploying business applications. There is a basic assumption

that the reader of this document is sufficiently familiar with Cisco

Integrated Services Routers

(

http://www.cisco.com/go/isr

Document Objectives

The primary objective of this document is to provide an overview of the Cisco Application

eXtension Platform (AXP) product and its value propositions to the market.

Introduction

As corporations become increasingly global, there is a bid to be closer to their customers and

provide better quality of experience in a localized manner. With technology facilitating virtual

workplaces and geographical independence, the number of branches is growing 11 percent every

year. This trend has put the spotlight onto branches, and, given the fragmented nature of branch

network and IT infrastructure, the past few years have seen a progressive transformation to

overhaul IT. Today, there is increased focus on lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) and

bringing services consistency across the branch, campus, WAN, and data center in a ubiquitous

manner.

With the proliferation of branches, there is a pressing need to decrease operational expenses,

hence the trend of centralization and “thin” branches, especially with regard to network and IT

infrastructure. But because an increasing number of decision makers are based there,

centralization has to be achieved without compromising branch performance or availability. The

role of the Cisco integrated services router in addressing this challenge is well known. It has

hitherto addressed various aspects of branch consolidation: security, mobility, switching, routing,

WAN optimization, unified communications, and more. These have largely involved the integration

of network elements. The logical next step is to provide a greater degree of flexibility to network

and IT decision makers by addressing another primary problem area dealing with network and

application convergence.

This white paper looks at some of the new Cisco innovations, in particular the Cisco AXP, which

enables the development and hosting of applications onto a Network Module Enhanced (NME) or

Advanced Integration Module (AIM) within the Cisco integrated services router.