Cisco ACI, Cisco’s software-defined networking (SDN) architecture, enhances business agility, reduces TCO, automates IT tasks, and accelerates data center application deployments.
Why Today’s Solutions Are Insufficient:
Today’s solutions lack an application-centric approach. The use of virtual overlays on top of physical layers has increased complexity by adding policies, services, and devices.
Traditional SDN solutions are network centric and based on constructs that replicate networking functions that already exist.
ACI Key Benefits:
Centralized Policy-Defined Automation Management
- Holistic application-based solution that delivers flexibility and automation for agile IT
- Automatic fabric deployment and configuration with single point of management
- Automation of repetitive tasks, reducing configuration errors
Real-Time Visibility and Application Health Score
- Centralized real-time health monitoring of physical and virtual networks
- Instant visibility into application performance combined with intelligent placement decisions
- Faster troubleshooting for day-2 operation
Open and Comprehensive End-to-End Security
- Open APIs, open standards, and open source elements that enable software flexibility for DevOps teams, and firewall and application delivery controller (ADC) ecosystem partner integration
- Automatic capture of all configuration changes integrated with existing audit and compliance tracking solutions
- Detailed role-based access control (RBAC) with fine-grained fabric segmentation
Application Agility
- Management of application lifecycle from development, to deployment, to decommissioning—in minutes
- Automatic application deployment and faster provisioning based on predefined profiles
- Continuous and rapid delivery of virtualized and distributed applications
ACI Technology Benefits
The main purpose of a datacenter fabric is to move traffic from physical and virtualized servers, bring it in the best possible way to its destination and while doing so apply meaningful services such as:
- Traffic optimization that improves application performance
- Telemetry services that go beyond classic port counters
- Overall health monitoring for what constitutes an application
- Applying security rules embedded with forwarding
The main benefits of using a Cisco ACI fabric are the following:
- Single point of provisioning either via GUI or via REST API
- Connectivity for physical and virtual workloads with complete visibility on virtual machine traffic
- Hypervisors compatibility and integration without the need to add software to the hypervisor
- Ease (and speed) of deployment
- Simplicity of automation
- Multitenancy (network slicing)
- Capability to create portable configuration templates
- Hardware-based security
- Elimination of flooding from the fabric
- Ease of mapping application architectures into the networking configuration
- Capability to insert and automate firewall, load balancers and other L4-7 services
- Intuitive and easy configuration process
More information can be found at www.cisco.com/go/aci
