Cisco introduced its Catalyst 8000 Series Edge Platform, a new high-performance routing platform to help customers accelerate cloud adoption and deliver secure and automated connectivity to applications across cloud, data center, and edge.
Cisco says its new platform allows customers to adopt cloud solutions at their own pace. It adopts a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. Three versions are available.
- The Catalyst 8500 Series Edge Platform is aimed at data center, colocation, and aggregation sites, and features the industry’s highest performing SD-WAN offering with integrated 40G and 100G Ethernet ports in a compact single rack unit form factor. It is powered by Cisco’s third-generation Quantum Flow Processor.
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The Catalyst 8300 Series Edge Platform is made to handle edge connectivity at branch sites, offering modular access with a diverse set of connectivity choices for customers to deliver services on-demand to quickly adapt to changing business requirements. It also provides customers with up to four times better SD-WAN service performance than the current Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISRs).
- The Catalyst 8000V Edge Software delivers all the same capabilities in software. It can be deployed in the cloud or virtualized on a platform such as Cisco’s 5000 Series Enterprise Network Compute System (ENCS).
- The Cisco Catalyst Cellular Gateway helps customers deploy wireless WAN without changes to existing infrastructure. It elevates cellular to a primary SD-WAN link option with gigabit connectivity to any cloud or location. The initial release supports Advanced 4G LTE CAT 18 speeds, with 5G versions coming soon.
“With the proliferation of applications, workloads and services becoming more distributed across the edge-cloud continuum, organizations are facing new realities at the WAN edge,” said JL Valente, Vice President, Product Management for Cisco’s Intent-Based Networking Group. “In building secure multicloud access architectures, IT organizations need the agility to change course and scale quickly along with the needs of business. The Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform bridges the WAN edge and the cloud edge, providing secure, high-performance connectivity for distributed users to any cloud while delivering IT visibility and business agility.”