Cisco Cisco Application Extension Platform for SRE Data Sheet

 

 

 

Solution Overview 

© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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Survivable Core Network Services at the Branch Office 

Cisco

®

 and Infoblox optimizes service delivery of critical applications such as email 

messaging, web, and IP phone services at remote offices with automated core network 

services that offer local service resiliency, centralized visibility, and management.  

Reliable core network services at branch offices are essential to maintain application availability for 

critical business processes. Even minor interruptions in Domain Name System (DNS) services may 

lead to lost transactions at a retail store or at a bank branch office, resulting in lost revenue and 

affecting employee productivity. As we continue to experience an explosion of IP addresses at the 

enterprise, IT organizations are challenged to contain costs and maintain proper address 

management for ongoing service delivery. Current solutions for providing core network services 

force trade-offs in performance and availability in order to gain easier management. 

The Cisco Application Extension Platform (AXP) and Infoblox vNIOS together offer a solution that 

automates tedious core network service tasks, reducing errors while increasing flexibility. Branch-

office network infrastructure becomes more available, more dynamic, and easier to manage, 

thereby enabling server consolidation. 

Today’s enterprises continue to see a six percent growth in branch offices. That growth means 

more remote locations serving more people, who all need core network services to get work done.  

Enterprise IT organizations continue to face pressure to extend services to remote sites without 

increasing costs. An important strategy to address this problem is virtualizing the network and 

consolidating servers at the data center. Centralizing core network services in the data center can 

create problems for end users in branch offices, compromising performance because of WAN 

latencies and making remote networks unusable when WAN links fail. This approach can have 
major implications on a business’ profitability if core network services such as DNS, Dynamic Host 

Configuration Protocol (DHCP), IP address management (IPAM), and Remote Authentication In 

User Service (RADIUS) are temporarily unavailable to regional and branch-office users.  

On the other hand, hosting core network services on general-purpose servers at each remote site 

poses security and manageability challenges

—and dramatically increases equipment and 

operational costs. 

Figure 1 illustrates core network services.