Data Center and Virtualization

ACI: Addressing The Changing Landscape

Industry shifts are redefining IT at all levels. On-premise IT consumption models are shifting to cloud-based services. IT as a service (IaaS) is supplanted by applications as a service. Separate development and operations are moving toward integrated development and operations (DevOps). Box-centric management models are migrating to application-centric management.

Business agility requires application agility, so IT teams need to provision applications in hours instead of months. Resources need to scale up (or down) in minutes, not hours.

Traditional approaches take a siloed operational view, with no common operational model between the application, network, security, and cloud teams. A common operational model delivers application agility, simplified operations, assured performance, and scale.

The Solution: An Application-Centric Approach to Managing Your Infrastructure

Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles. ACI delivers software flexibility with the scalability of hardware performance.

Cisco ACI consists of:

• The new Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches
• A centralized policy management and Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)
• A Cisco Application Virtual Switch (AVS) for the virtual network edge
• Software and hardware innovations
• Integrated physical and virtual infrastructure
• An open ecosystem of network, storage, management, and orchestration vendors

Key characteristics of ACI include:

• Simplified automation by an application-driven policy model
• Centralized visibility with real-time, application health monitoring
• Open software flexibility for DevOps teams and ecosystem partner integration
• Scalable performance and multi-tenancy in hardware

The future of networking with ACI is about providing a network that is deployed, monitored, and managed in a fashion that supports DevOps and rapid application change. ACI does so through the reduction of complexity and a common policy framework that can automate provisioning and managing of resources.

ACI is an innovative, highly secure architecture based upon a number of different elements, outlined below.

Application-Focused Fabric

Combine hardware, software, and ASIC innovations into an integrated systems approach to take advantage of standard Ethernet and IP protocols.

The extensible, object-oriented OS offers comprehensive programmability.

Application-level health scores, counters, and policies for both physical and virtual applications simplify troubleshooting and provide visibility.

Centralized Management, Automation, and Orchestration

A common management framework for network, application, security, and virtualization teams makes IT more agile.

ACI automates all fabric management tasks, including image management, configuration, and stitching of other networking infrastructure services such as firewalls and load balancers.

Mixed Workload and Migration Optimization for Any Application, Anywhere, Anytime

Facilitate provisioning of applications while promoting performance and visibility correlation between logical and physical networks.

Normalize physical and virtual server transport between different hypervisors and bare metal servers to ease migration from virtual to physical, or virtual to virtual.

Highly Secure Multi-Tenant Environment

Advance proper isolation and SLAs for different tenants while providing a consistent security policy across physical and virtual applications.

Data center teams define security and networking policies using a common policy language abstraction. This helps security teams to provide robust policy definitions independent of the network topology.

Extensibility and Openness

ACI supports the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy, embracing open APIs, open source, and open standards. This provides the broadest choice in data center management and infrastructure.

A well-documented set of northbound and southbound APIs, available through the Cisco Developer Network, support rapid system integration and flexibility for:

• Layer 4-7 services
• Virtual network infrastructure
• Monitoring
• Management
• Orchestration services

Investment Protection – People and Infrastructure

Take advantage of existing IT teams' skillsets and infrastructure to lower overall TCO.

Innovative 40 Gb bi-directional optics allow for the reuse of current 10 Gb cabling to reduce costly fiber upgrades.

Customers can run Cisco Nexus 9000 switches in a standalone deployment or migrate to full ACI fabric mode with a software upgrade. This approach, combined with open interfaces to support existing infrastructure, provides investment protection across the entire portfolio.

Summary

ACI can enable agile deployment of applications across enterprises and service provider organizations. Its fabric foundation is built for telemetry, efficiency, scale, and application awareness, leading to lower TCO. The next-generation data center will be built upon ACI principles that are designed for current and future applications.

Products

Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches bring new, industry-leading performance, power, port density, and open programmability innovations. Products include:

• Cisco Nexus 9396PX
• Cisco Nexus 93128TX
• Cisco Nexus 9508

Cisco Application Virtual Switch (AVS) provides a consistent virtual switch infrastructure between ACI fabrics and the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch for existing data center fabrics.

Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) programmatically automates network provisioning and control based on application requirements and policies.

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Security for data centers solves many complexities in customer environments. ACI Security treats firewalls as a pool of resources and intelligently stitches them according to application network policies. ACI Security offers full acceleration dynamically in hardware and directly integrates into ACI.

Delivered by Cisco and our Cisco Certified Partners, service engagements result in measurable business gains for our customers with benefits such as 15-20% faster acceleration to revenue; 30% lower infrastructure costs; 50% faster disaster recovery; and 90% reduction in deployment time.

Cisco Services for ACI

Read more about Cisco Services for Application Centric Infrastructure.

Cisco Business Strategy capabilities develop the business case and master plan for Application Centric Infrastructure.

Cisco Readiness Planning capabilities transform data centers to an Application Centric Infrastructure.

Cisco Quick Start Service for Nexus 9000 provides consulting for deployment.

Cisco Accelerated Deployment Services for Nexus 9000 support rapid transition to an application-centric architecture.

Cisco Data Center Services for Operations Enablement prepare your environment for ACI while addressing all stages of the operations lifecycle.

Cisco Product Support is available globally 24 hours daily for Cisco software and hardware products associated with the Cisco Nexus 9000. Enhanced Cisco-delivered support also includes Cisco SMARTnet or Cisco Smart Net Total Care*.

Cisco Services to Secure Data Center Infrastructure

Cisco Data Center Security Design Assessment Service helps you understand your security infrastructure design and how it aligns with your security policy.

Cisco Data Center Security ASA Migration Service helps you migrate your third-party or Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) platform, including configurations and firewall rules, to a virtualized environment.

For more information on Cisco Services, contact your Cisco Sales representative or email as-aci-support@cisco.com.

*Cisco products only