Tag: Cisco routers

Cisco strengthens the industry switches, routers

Cisco has announced a Catalyst Ethernet switch doubly powerful, condensed edge router and a host of other new and enhanced products designed to help companies extend the services of more powerful network of branches and beyond.

View a slideshow of the HP and Cisco products announced today

Cisco says the offer will fit her “borderless networks, the architecture is intended to support applications, processing cycles and services that are increasingly distributed and virtualized, such as cloud computing environments and software as a service.

“It’s hard to find a comparable product portfolio in the industry,” said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group. “No one out there with the”.

Topping the list is an improved version of E Catalyst 4500 switch that doubles the bandwidth of the slot of the previous versions. The 10-slot chassis now has 848Gbps of bandwidth of the system or 48 Gbps per slot. It also runs modular Cisco IOS XE Linux-based operating system, the first set of Catalyst to do so.

384 The switch supports Power-over-Ethernet ports also Gigabit Ethernet SFP ports 200 or 100 ports of 10G Ethernet SFP +. It also offers three options for software services – Connecting Base, IP and services company; TrustSec, MediaNet EnergyWise and security, video and energy management and visibility NetFlow applications.

Kerravala notes that in 848Gbps, the 4500E is now “more robust” than the higher-end Catalyst 6500 (Cisco has said previously that its previous 4500 E matched up well against high-level offerings from rivals such as HP). He and other observers expect Cisco to upgrade soon 720Gbps 6500 to 1. 44Tbps perhaps, or almost 3Tbps in a Virtual Switching System (VSS) configuration.

4500 E switch starts at $ 27,480.

Another novelty is the short version of the recently unveiled edge router ASR 1000 for the companies – the ASR 1001. This 1RU router enables users to improve application performance of 2.5 Gbps to 5 Gbps through software activation.

It supports software redundancy housing and reserve active images of the IOS on the same hardware. Have parity with existing versions of the ASR 1000 line, including encryption in a maximum throughput of 1.8Gbps.

The ASR 1001 sports four Gigabit Ethernet ports and an integrated single slot which holds the same port adapters that current ASR 1000. It also includes a daughter board which, at first customer ship sport T two OC-3 and three of four WAN interfaces. Later versions will have cards that support daughter 8xT-1/E-1 (channelized), Ethernet 4xGigabit, and a hard drive – possibly with a minimum of 160 gigabytes – to the activation of wide-area services (WAAS).

Regarding WAAS Cisco WAAS Express unveiled a version of IOS-based WAN Optimizer available on demand application acceleration based on Layer 4 information. Cisco also released a version of WAAS for services Routing Engine (SRE) in the form of Integrated Services Routers (ISR) that provides layer 4-7 in the optimization of demand.

Also new to the ISR is UCS Express, a subsidiary version of the Unified Computer System blade server data center that is designed for the survival of the application. UCS Express running on Microsoft Windows and VMware, and is designed to ensure operational coherence between UCS and application servers in the data center and remote sites. But there is a complete UCS, Cisco says – that differ in memory and disk capacity, and not support the virtual machine mobility.

The ASR 1001 will be available in December. It costs $ 30,000. WAAS Express is available now starting at $ 1,000. SRE WAAS is also available now and starts at $ 2,500. UCS Express will be available in November and starts at $ 2,800.

For wireless local area networks, Cisco Aironet 1040 unveiled the access point. It is an entry point 802.11n access level for small and medium enterprises and “economic buyers,” says Cisco. It costs $ 495 for a single-band version and $ 795 dual-band.

Cisco tie things together with integration services. Smart Business Enterprise Architecture provides “prescriptive” design guides for more than 10,000 endpoints and Smart Net Total Care is a support service to the management of the company’s installed base.

Smart Net Total Care will be available in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2011 Cisco – May, June and July 2011. The price varies depending on the scope of service. SBA Enterprise is now available. The price was not disclosed.

Cisco also included in the management applications to its portfolio of services called CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution (LMS). LMS 4.0 supports the management of more than 560 Cisco devices, including the new G2 ISR routers, and Catalyst 2960-S, 3560-X, 3750 X-4500E and switches. Provides control, repair, configuration and lifecycle management, and can be deployed in “workplace”, defined by EnergyWise, TrustSec and other specific operational groups.

LMS 4. 0 is available now for $ 2,500 for up to 50 devices and up to $ 90,000 for 10,000 devices.

Rootkit threatens Cisco routers

Cisco and the security community are debating the reality of rootkits attacking the Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System (IOS) after a researcher presented a proof of concept attack, which threatens Cisco routers and voice over IP phones.

At the EUSecWest conference in London, Core Security researcher Sebastian Muniz presented a proof of concept attack which he called the “Da IOS Rootkit”, a binary modification to the IOS image.

“The main feature of Da IOS Rootkit is the universal password,” Muniz said in an interview on the EUSecWest Web site. “Every call to the different password validation routines grant access to the user if the unique rootkit password is specified.”

In response to the presentation, the company has published a set of best practices. Cisco noted that “no new vulnerability on the Cisco IOS software was disclosed during the presentation. To the best of our knowledge, no exploit code has been made publicly available, and Cisco has not received any customer reports of exploitation”.

Cisco and the security community are debating the reality of rootkits attacking the Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System (IOS) after a researcher presented a proof of concept attack, which threatens Cisco routers and voice over IP phones.

At the EUSecWest conference in London, Core Security researcher Sebastian Muniz presented a proof of concept attack which he called the “Da IOS Rootkit”, a binary modification to the IOS image.

“The main feature of Da IOS Rootkit is the universal password,” Muniz said in an interview on the EUSecWest Web site. “Every call to the different password validation routines grant access to the user if the unique rootkit password is specified.”

In response to the presentation, the company has published a set of best practices. Cisco noted that “no new vulnerability on the Cisco IOS software was disclosed during the presentation. To the best of our knowledge, no exploit code has been made publicly available, and Cisco has not received any customer reports of exploitation”.

If the exploit code is made public, it could pose a further security risk to Cisco’s customers, according to Chris Gatford, senior security consultant for penetration testing firm, Pure Hacking.

“If the code reaches the wild, it could be dangerous because of the lack of security attention given to Cisco’s switches and routers,” he told ZDNet Australia.

At the AusCERT 2008 conference on the Gold Coast last week, Cisco’s chief security officer John Stewart complained that many of Cisco’s customers fail to upgrade IOS, with some still operating on version 10.3, which was released on 1995, Apr. 13. The current release is version 12.4.

“I can give them the list of known vulnerabilities, but customers still don’t want to touch it because it’s working… I think there’s a certain level of ‘well it’s working, don’t touch it, because it’s fragile, it might break’. I understand that, however I don’t find it acceptable,” he said.

Australian customers often avoid securing switches and routers, despite these devices offering a gateway to all network traffic.

“If I was to do a comparison of the number of assessments on operating systems versus networking hardware, I would say the OS and apps would be 90 per cent of what a customer is asking for and very few have us look at switches and routers. And once again, if you compromise a switch and router you own all those OSes, because you have access to all that sensitive traffic going in and out,” Pure Hacking’s Gatford said.