More inadequate CSCO hardware. At least you guys are consistent!
Cisco Quietly Intros Net Cache
By Todd Spangler
June 17, 1999 9:48 AM ET
Without any fanfare, Cisco Systems this week has
started shipping its next-generation caching
appliance, the Cache Engine 500, which is supposed
to be much more scalable and network-friendly than
Cisco's previous caching product.
John Yen, product marketing manager for the Cisco
Cache Engine, said Cisco was targeting key
customers to market the new system rather than
promoting it through a traditional product launch.
But Dataquest analyst James Staten speculated that
the stealthy rollout could be because Cisco's
much-anticipated caching upgrade isn't up to snuff.
"The only conclusion I can come to about why they
would sneak out the Cache Engine 500 is that they're
not too proud of the product," Staten said. "This is
probably a nonevent.
Another analyst felt differently: Collaborative Research
principal analyst Peter Christy said the Cache Engine
500 looked like Cisco's first credible competitor in the
caching market.
"Cisco has fixed the performance problems, and the
performance looks comparable to their competitors
now," Christy said. "With Cisco re-entering the
market with a product that works, it's easy to expect
that they'll sell a lot of them."
Cisco's Yen said that the new 500 series of caching
appliances are a substantial improvement over the
previous iteration, which Cisco has discontinued.
"We took a lot of knowledge from the current product
and we redesigned the hardware, and we've done
some performance tuning," Yen said. "One of the key
areas of our focus was to make sure they were
network-integrated solutions."
Cisco is offering two different models of the
rack-mountable Cache Engine 500 series: The 505,
an entry-level cache designed for branch offices with
T1 (1.5-megabit-per-second) connections; and the
550, intended for enterprise sites and Internet service
providers' points of presence at up to 11 Mbps. A third
option consists of clustering 550s to be able to handle
45-Mbps links.
Cisco is providing cache clustering through a new
version of the Web Cache Communication Protocol
(WCCP), which can now load balance traffic from a
Cisco router transparently to multiple Cache Engine
500 boxes.
The new appliances offer three times the
price-performance ratio than the first-generation
Cache Engine, Yen said. For example, the Cache
Engine 505 can handle up to two T1 connections and
is priced at $4,995; the first Cache Engine had the
same capacity but cost $15,000. The 550 carries a
list price of $11,995.
Along with performance enhancements, Cisco beefed
up management capabilities of the Cache Engine. The
Cache Engine 500 line now supports Cisco's
command-line interface, Simple Network Management
Protocol management and a network boot option.
Another major improvement in the Cache Engine 500
appliances is that they will pass through requests if
the bandwidth increases past their capacity and they
can't serve Web hits from cache.
"Because caching is fundamentally a
network-enhancing technology, we wanted to make
sure all of our caching devices adapted to the network
to make sure the cache doesn't become a
bottleneck," Yen said.
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