Deliver simple and secure network management
Cisco ACI
Networking Essentials
For single data center. Includes Cisco ACI management and operations capabilities.
Challenges networks face today
The pace of digital innovation is surging across the digital ecosystem in the post-pandemic era, resulting in a sharp expansion of applications and cloud usage. Experiences such as 8K ultra-high-definition video streaming, immersive Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications, gaming, self-driving vehicles, high-frequency stock trading, automation driven by AI/ML systems, IoT, and use cases with 5G networks are expected to be agile and secure by enterprises. In response, organizations are adopting software-defined networking frameworks in order to attain agility within the network across the data center and cloud and improve their business outcomes.
Today, networking is the foundation for modern applications, connecting microservices, functions, and data into mission-critical business services across a hybrid and multicloud world.
Cisco ACI
Networking Advantage
For multiple data centers and/or clouds. Includes advanced capabilities in addition to Networking Essentials.
Cisco ACI
Networking Premier
For multiple data centers and/or clouds. Includes Essentials and Advantage as well as insights and orchestration capabilities.
How does Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI®) play into this networking continuum? Cisco ACI can operate with our Nexus® Dashboard Platform, enabling agility and resiliency in hybrid-cloud and multicloud environments. It captures higher-level business and user intent in the form of a policy and translates this policy into the network constructs necessary to dynamically provision the network, security, and infrastructure services.
Cisco ACI, the industry’s most secure, open, and comprehensive Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution, enables automation that accelerates infrastructure deployment and governance, simplifies management to easily move workloads across a multifabric and multicloud frameworks, and proactively secures against risk arising from anywhere. It radically simplifies, optimizes, and expedites the application deployment lifecycle.
Modern data centers are dynamic. IT operations must meet the expectations of quality-of-service business needs in a rapidly changing environment. Cisco ACI transforms IT operations from reactive to proactive with a highly intelligent set of software capabilities that analyze every component of the data center to ensure business intent, guarantee reliability, and identify performance issues in the network before they happen.
As applications have become more pervasive across the enterprise network, IT professionals are looking to build solutions for consistent policy and encryption from the campus to the cloud.
To keep up with the massive influx of data and the increased demands on the network for speed and agility, networking professionals are learning to broker, connect, build, and govern their networks not only in the data center, but also across a vast cloud landscape.
Cisco ACI was built to simplify the IT infrastructure and operations by automating the network, providing pervasive security, and helping accelerate businesses to move to a cloud or multicloud environment.
With Cisco ACI, customers can manage complexity, maximize business benefits, and deploy workloads in any location, small and large, on premises and remote locations, in private and public clouds, satellite data centers, and 5G-enabled telecom edges.
The main benefits of Cisco ACI include the following:
Accelerate network operations
Cisco ACI provides a flexible and yet highly available network that allows agile application deployment within a site, across sites, and across global data centers while removing the need for complex Data Center Interconnect (DCI) infrastructure.
● Empower the 400G to 800G evolution.
● Be provided with centralized network management and visibility, with full automation and real-time network health monitoring.
● Have seamless integration of underlay and overlay networks.
● Employ open northbound APIs to provide flexibility for DevOps teams and ecosystem partner integration.
● Use a common platform for managing physical and virtual environments.
● Automate IT workflows and have flexible application deployment.
● Expand network reach and extend mobility domains using standards-based extensions.
Securely expand to multicloud
● Employ a secure cloud-ready SDN solution.
● Create business continuity and provide disaster recovery.
● Get inherent security with a zero-trust allow list model and innovative features in policy enforcement, microsegmentation, and analytics.
● Be provided with integrated security with Cisco security products and ecosystem partners.
● Have a consistent security posture at scale across a multicloud environment.
Deliver superior experience
● Benefit from operational simplicity, with common policy, management, and operation models across application, network, and security resources.
● Use flexible deployment models.
● Be provided with single policy and seamless connectivity across any data center and public cloud.
● Employ container networking enabled by integration with OpenStack, OpenShift, Kubernetes, and Cisco UCS® Director.
● Have open APIs and a programmable SDN fabric, with 65+ ecosystem partners including Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
● Have the power to scale.
Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform
Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides a single automation platform to access operational services and tools for the data center and network. You can deploy policy and connectivity automation, visibility and analytics tools, and traffic aggregation capability using the Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform. It becomes even more of a collaborative focal point with the inclusion of operations-critical, third-party applications and tools. The platform drives the adoption of cloud-native application practices, which provide the following benefits:
● Easy to use
◦ Customizable role-based UI view to provide a focused view on network operators’ use cases.
◦ Single Sign-On (SSO) for a seamless user experience across operation services.
◦ Single console for health monitoring and quick service turnup.
● Easy to scale
◦ High availability, scale-out operations from a single dashboard.
◦ Scale use cases, leveraging flexible deployment options.
◦ Operations that span across on-premises, multicloud, and edge networks.
● Easy to maintain
◦ Seamless integration and lifecycle management of operational services.
◦ Onboarding and managing operational services across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
◦ Single point of integration for critical third-party applications and tools.
Cisco Nexus Dashboard visibility and analytics
Cisco Nexus Dashboard gives customers the ability to monitor and analyze their fabric in real time to identify anomalies, provide root-cause analysis and capacity planning, and accelerate troubleshooting. By tracking historical context, collecting and processing hardware and software telemetry data, and correlating customer designs with Cisco best-practices, customers can get excellent visibility and awareness of issues affecting their environment and take corrective actions.
Cisco Nexus Dashboard policy and connectivity automation
Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides a single point of provisioning for multiple Cisco ACI fabrics operating in a coordinated way. When this solution is combined with the latest networking enhancements of Cisco ACI, organizations can manage extension network elements such as Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) instances, bridge domains, and subnets across multiple fabrics. It enables centralized policy and security controls across geographically distributed fabrics and very large scaled-out fabrics with automation and operations from a common point, allowing for a global cloud-scale infrastructure.
Cisco ACI and architectural solutions are built with the following building blocks:
● Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).
● Cisco Nexus 9000 Series spine and leaf switches for Cisco ACI.
Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)
The infrastructure controller is the main architectural component of the Cisco ACI solution. It is the unified point of automation and management for the Cisco ACI fabric, policy enforcement, and health monitoring. The APIC appliance is a centralized, clustered controller that optimizes performance and unifies the operation of physical and virtual environments. The controller manages and operates a scalable multitenant Cisco ACI fabric.
The main features of the Cisco APIC include the following:
● Application-centric network policies.
● Data-model-based declarative provisioning.
● Application and topology monitoring and troubleshooting.
● Third-party integration Layer-4 through Layer-7 (L4-L7) services.
◦ VMware vCenter.
◦ Nutanix Prism and AHV
◦ Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), and Azure Pack.
◦ Open vSwitch (OVS), OpenStack, and OpenShift.
◦ Kubernetes.
● Image management (spine and leaf).
● Cisco ACI inventory and configuration.
● Implementation of a distributed framework across a cluster of appliances.
● Health scores for critically managed objects (tenants, application profiles, switches, etc).
● Fault, event, and performance management.
The controller framework enables broad ecosystem and industry interoperability with Cisco ACI. It enables interoperability between a Cisco ACI environment and management, orchestration, virtualization, and L4-L7 services from a broad range of vendors.
