Next up, we want to talk about another Cisco platform that's known as WAAS, W-A-A-S.
It stands for Wide Area Application Services.
WAAS has been around for a very long time.
In fact, it greatly predates the concept of SD-WAN.
And WAAS is designed to do exactly what we've been talking about throughout this entire skill,
which is to improve the end user experience across the wide area network.
We want to make it so we can't even tell that we are going across a wide area network.
Or at least that's the maybe too ambitious goal of something like WAAS.
And so instead of deploying SD-WAN and all of these things, we could just deploy WAAS devices to help us out.
So what exactly is a WAAS device?
Well, it's basically a product that's specifically designed in hardware to do all of the things that we've been talking about.
So we want to hardware optimize our wide area network.
And we can do that with techniques like compression, but we can get even heavier compression levels.
We can do things like the actual deduplication of packets.
I know we just got done talking about the duplication of packets helping us out.
But this has been an era before we had multiple circuits everywhere.
And plenty of other options for ways to improve our utilization of our wide area network.
And so you had two different ways of doing this.
You could have the WAN edges here and we'd have our WAAS boxes down here.
And the WAAS boxes would communicate with each other through the wide area network and have tunnels built and all of these things.
Or you could just put them directly in line with the wide area network circuits.
So the question we might ask is, OK, that's great and all, but why are we talking about legacy technology?
I mean, we should all be on software-defined WAN now, correct?
And that's like saying that, well, because I enjoy apples, I should no longer enjoy pears.
I don't know why. That's maybe a terrible analogy.
But the idea here is simply that they do two completely different things.
And while Cisco SD-WAN allows us to deploy some amount of optimization, everything we've been talking about in this skill,
a WAAS box is able to do all of that in such a better way.
And so to answer our question, is it still relevant?
The answer is yes. It's not only still relevant.
Cisco expects us to potentially integrate our WAAS devices in with our SD-WAN.
And so that's going to lead us to a conversation around AppNav.
AppNav, and by the way, oftentimes it's called AppNav-XE now that we're in iOS XE, is a way for us to manage our WAAS environment.
And because of the fact that Cisco says, hey, we can run them both,
we need to come up with an architecture that allows for that and makes it so that neither of these architectures are interfering with one another.
So here's how this works. It's going to look very similar to this down here, but we'll add a few other details.
So first of all, we're going to have our SD-WAN edges, so an edge on both sides.
And we are going to place a WAAS box out of band.
So we're going to want our WAAS boxes here sort of connected to our edges as services.
Now we're going to start throwing out a lot of acronyms here.
First of all, our edge in this architecture is known as a service controller, which can be abbreviated as an SC.
Furthermore, we're going to run an agent on the edge, and this is a WAAS agent.
The WAAS agent is going to be known as the app nav controller.
And that can be abbreviated as ANC.
All right, so we have the SC, which is the edge device.
We have the ANC, which is the software agent running on the edge,
which is what our WAAS environment is going to communicate with in order to deploy WAAS technologies.
So we're not quite done, though, because we also get to have a software package.
And this software package is known as the WAAS Central Manager.
And the WAAS Central Manager can be abbreviated as WCM.
All right. Oh, man, are we done yet?
We're getting pretty close as far as the acronyms are concerned, at least, not necessarily the architecture.
WCM is going to be an application that we as network admins are able to log into,
and this is going to push configuration directly to the WAAS boxes.
Now, interestingly, if we have a non-SD-WAN environment,
then the WAAS Central Manager is also going to push configuration down to the ANC.
But when we're talking about deploying this into SD-WAN,
we're not going to allow that communication because the edges are being managed by manager.
So here's our SD-WAN manager or vManage.
And what instead happens is that WAAS Central Manager will push configuration to manager,
which then pushes it down to the ANCs on behalf of the WCM.
Now, if you think that's enough acronyms, there is one more to throw out there.
I actually left it out of the diagram.
This right here, this WAAS device is known as a WAAS node, which is abbreviated as WN.
four different acronyms that we need to make sure that we've got down.
The service controller itself, which is the edge itself, I suppose.
The ANC is the agent. The WN is the WAAS node.
And whoops, wrong one. The WCM down here, that is the WAAS Central Manager.
What happens in the end is that we have an environment that leverages the best of both worlds.
We have our SD-WAN manager still in place, managing our edges.
We have our WCM in place, which is managing our WAAS devices.
We're leveraging WAAS devices themselves, or really, WAAS nodes, WNs,
in order to push a lot of these hardware-optimized WAN utilization features across the wide area network.
And on top of all that, we are still running SD-WAN.
So that is how AppNav comes together.
It really is this integration between Cisco WAAS and Cisco SD-WAN.