Cisco Cisco Application Extension Platform for SRE 白皮書
White Paper
© 2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 1 of 10
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.