Cisco Introduces the Cisco Metro 1500 Series, MAN DWDM; Product Marks Cisco's Entrance into Emerging Enterprise DWDM Space; Strengthens Company's Optical Networking Product Line

Business Wire, May 2, 2000

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 2, 2000

Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO) today announced availability of the Cisco Metro 1500 Series Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) Dense-Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) platform. A cost-effective, scalable solution designed for large enterprise networks, the Cisco Metro 1500 series provides fast and reliable transport of emerging high-bandwidth applications such as data center interconnect and consolidation, storage area networking, e-commerce and high-speed disaster recovery networking.

According to Carl Engineer, director of marketing for Cisco's Metropolitan Services Business Unit, enterprises today face dramatically escalating bandwidth demands as more and more of their mission-critical data, voice and video services must be instantly accessed and backed up from multiple and sometimes remote locations.

"Increased availability of dark fiber and reduced network services costs have made metropolitan area networks (MANs) the transport mechanism of choice for many of these businesses, as it provides an extremely cost-effective alternative to the provisioning of leased lines," said Engineer. "The Cisco Metro 1500 series allows enterprises to connect and extend their existing Local Area Networks (LANs) to the MAN, no matter what protocol is used. This creates a simple, low-cost way to overcome distance limitations that would otherwise impede access to large amounts of data quickly and transparently."

The Cisco Metro 1500 series is a high reliability, protocol-independent solution for point-to-point, add/drop and ring topologies with up to 32 wavelengths per fiber, which gives network administrators the flexibility to support their existing infrastructure, including Gigabit Ethernet, packet over SONET, ESCON/FICON, ATM and Fiber Channel. In addition, the Cisco Metro 1500 series can free up costly real estate by creating "serverless" offices that connect to remote and centralized corporate locations or data centers.

Roy Sanford, Vice President of Enterprise Alliances at EMC Corp., stated, "Optical networking technology provides high-speed networking capabilities for customers deploying distributed Enterprise Storage Networks. EMC and Cisco continue to work closely to develop these storage area networking solutions that allow our mutual customers to better share, manage and protect their critical information."

Based on an OEM agreement with ADVA Optical Networking (Munich, Germany), the Cisco Metro 1500 series extends Cisco's line of DWDM optical networking products into the enterprise space. Current Cisco DWDM solutions for service provider networks include the Cisco ONS 15800 Wavemux, an industry-leading DWDM platform capable of supporting up to 128 channels, carrying up to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) -- or OC-192 -- traffic each. The Cisco Metro 1500 series is fully integrated into CiscoView, a web-based version of Cisco's popular graphical device management application, and is supported by Cisco's worldwide service and support organization.

Pricing and Availability

Available today, the Cisco Metro 1500 series starts at U.S.$11,000 list per channel.

About Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems (Nasdaq:CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Cisco news and information are available at http://www.cisco.com.

Note to Editors: Cisco, Cisco IOS, Cisco Systems, the Cisco Systems logo are registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.