Cisco to Release Caching Server for iOS/macOS?

[dstranathan]

My regional Apple Engineer told me that Cisco is going to be releasing an appliance/service/feature to provide iOS/macOS caching services, similar to their own Caching sevice in OS X Server.

Has anyone else heard this?

[c_kay]

Wish they'd do a NetBoot server as well.

[dgreening]

Was there ever any concrete information about this? All I can find is a couple of articles talking about it at a non-implemented level.

[iJake]

I'm not an expert on all of our products but to my knowledge we do not have one that does exactly that. What we do have, though, is Cisco WAAS which has caching and other connection acceleration technology. It has been around for some time, though. If you have a link or a name of a product I can try to find out more.

Cisco WAAS

[dgreening]

@iJake Will do! Our Apple SE had mentioned it to us around WWDC last year. We are in the planning phases for a global SUS implementation, and were wondering if Mac "servers" were really our only option for caching functionality.

[dfarnworth_b]

Little update having heard something on the grapevine.

This is enabled by Cisco Intelligent WAN/Akamai Connect.

It isn't a specific partnership with Apple, more just that by chance the protocol used marry up and so iOS/macOS caching are enabled by this coincidence.

[iJake]

FWIW, we do this internally at Cisco.

[chris_miller]

That's pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[dfarnworth_b]

Hi @iJake

I'd be interested to know precisely which Cisco products need to be licensed and configured to enable this functionality so we can check with our networks teams whether we have these products available to us?

Many thanks
Dan

[iJake]

@dfarnworth_barc Haven’t been on here in a bit. Email me at jadavids at cisco dotcom and I’ll see if I can connect you with someone that can answer that question.

[Eigger]

@iJake Does the solution also cache apps and personal iCloud/iTunes U content or just software updates? Didnt realized all our routers are Cisco ISR4451-X and we can buy modules and licenses to make this happen. Thanks Sir.

[iJake]

@Eigger You know, I’m not sure on that. It’s all done through Akamai Connect so the data you want to cache would have to be on that CDN. Assuming user data wouldn’t be.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/app_ntwk_services/waas/waas/v641/configure/guide/cnfg/akamai-connect.html