Cisco ACI - My Take

Recently Cisco introduced Application Centric Infrastructure and the Nexus 9000 family. I have read many terrific posts about ACI and everything ACI brings to the table.

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Network Engineer

To recap, ACI uses the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to unite physical and virtual networks. APIC is a policy management application, which creates application profiles and their associated physical, virtual, layer 4-layer7 dependencies, and automates their deployment. Think data center automation combined with SDN.

Sounds like a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) doesn’t it? Well…there is more. Insieme, now part of Cisco, also developed the hardware and ASICs for the Nexus 9000 as the Infrastructure.

To support ACI, the Nexus 9000s are deployed in a leaf and spine architecture and run in ACI mode. Together the Nexus 9000 and APIC provide an integrated hardware, software, custom ASIC, 40Gb, smoking fast, secure, multi-tenant cloud infrastructure.

Application Deployment in ACI Fabric


So with ACI and the Nexus 9000, can better define this as a Software Defined Hardware Implemented Data Center?  SDHDID….

Needs a better acronym


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