Product Overview
The Cisco® Wide Area Application Virtualization Engine (WAVE) product line consists of cost-effective, cloud-ready, video-enabled solutions for the branch office and the data center (Figure 1). With the industry's broadest product portfolio and flexible deployment models, Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) cost-effectively addresses the WAN optimization needs of small, medium-sized, and large customers.
Figure 1. Cisco Wide Area Virtualization Engines
Cisco WAVE Appliances for Branch-Office and Core Deployments
In Cisco WAAS Software Release 5.2 and later, the Cisco WAVE 294, 594, and 8541 can optionally be equipped with solid-state drives (SSDs). SSDs provide more reliable storage than existing hard disk drives (HDDs). Table 1 lists the supported SSD sizes for these platforms.
Table 1. Cisco WAVE Platforms That Support SSDs with Cisco WAAS 5.2 and Later
Appliance Part Number | Media Description | Quantity of Per Appliance |
WAVE-294-K9 | 200-GB HDD | 1 |
WAVE-294-SSD-K9 | 200-GB SSD | 1 |
WAVE-594-K9 | 500-GB HDD or 400-GB SSD | 1 or 2 (optional) |
WAVE-8541-K9 | 600-GB HDD or 600-GB SSD | 8 |
For more information, refer to the hardware specifications in Table 3 later in this document.
Benefits include the following:
● Improve employee productivity by enhancing the user experience for important business applications delivered over the WAN.
● Reduce the cost of branch-office operations by centralizing IT resources in the data center and lowering the cost of WAN bandwidth and by hosting Microsoft Windows applications on the Cisco WAVE branch-office appliance.
● Deliver enterprise-class video while reducing WAN bandwidth consumption with the Cisco WAAS video application optimizer or hosted Cisco Application and Content Networking System (ACNS) virtual blade.
● Increase IT agility by reducing the time and resources needed to deliver new IT services to the branch office.
● Simplify branch-office data protection for regulatory compliance purposes.
Cisco WAVE Appliances for the Data Center
Cisco WAVE data center appliances provide the high performance and scalable WAN optimization that data center solutions require. Benefits include:
● User-selectable I/O modules with support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet fiber, 1 Gigabit Ethernet copper, and 1 Gigabit Ethernet fiber
● Flexible deployment models including inline and Web Cache Communication Protocol (WCCP) for high performance, scalability, and network availability
● High performance for video, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and cloud applications as well as traditional enterprise applications; using context-aware data redundancy elimination (DRE), Cisco WAVE appliances can adapt caching behavior on the basis of the characteristics of individual applications, resulting in higher throughput and lower application latency
