Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.
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Cisco Catalyst Center
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Cisco Catalyst Center delivers a comprehensive, software-defined approach to managing enterprise networks. It simplifies operations by integrating automation, real-time monitoring, security policies, and advanced analytics into a single interface. Designed to support complex networking environments, Catalyst Center is designed to optimize efficiency, enhance security, and ensure seamless connectivity across wired and wireless infrastructures.
I have not selected Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure. I only just started working with it. But speaking from a classical networking background, the possibilities are endless.
We use Cisco Nexus Series Switches on Cisco ACI. It helps to make new and easy connections. It will better if we can use Generative Artificial Intelligence with them.. We manage many domains in one place. We manage more than one company’s network, so Cisco ACI is really helpful.
I had been involved on a project that involved ACI, SD-ACCESS and SD-WAN implementation and one of the better things the level of integration of the solutions on the policies level.
Cisco is Cisco. You have the ecosystem and you have end-to-end technology line-up and the integrations against the rest of the portfolio. No other vender has broad view.
It provide a consistency on the configuration. and you can push configure to all switches. before we managed the switch independently and use prime to push config and we always miss the devices and end up the switch is not have the standard configuration. and Cat Center can …
Prime was being end of lifed, so the choice was easy. Although it was still very new when we aquired it, we trusted Cisco to deliver a working platform.
It is very comparable, and both do about the same thing. However, we do find ACI more suitable for our datacenter, as opposed to our main company network.
I feel that Cisco ACI is quite good at different architecture designs. You can have it as just a straight layer two network. You can have it like we have with a vast layer three network and I think just for the layer three network it has easen up the use. I think the use cases for layer three networking is better for ACI. If you just want to do the layer two, you can still use Cisco Nexus and so on and that should be almost simpler in some way.
It is not appropriate as a source of Truth. Templates don't give me enough automation capablities to want to use them for Day-N configuration changes. I'd rather run a simple SolarWinds job or look at doing something more complex with other tools and stacks (e.g. Python, Ansible, etc.) I'm not sure what Cisco Catalyst Center is supposed to be used for. The name suggests it should be the application I go to for managing all my Catalyst devices, but instead it feels like I'm always fighting the tool and it's easier to do tasks with some other more specialized tool. The software feels like it was designed by software engineer, but not network engineers.
Cisco ACI, The object model is very complicated. It's something difficult to understand and also because there is a user interface, there's a web user interface, but it's not optimal to use it because if you want to deploy a large amount of VLAN or a large amount of tenants, it's quite difficult to do it or it's quite challenging. Maybe if you want to configure a large amount of ports using the web interface, it's not appropriate because it takes a lot of time. It also provides APIs to do that, but as I say, the object model is very difficult to understand and there is very little documentation about automation of the ACI and maybe there is but it's not so easy to find.
That's a good one. Because its power is only exceeded by its mystery, it makes our life easy. Prior to having Cisco Catalyst Center in place, a simple change, a simple change to put a network out into service, each of a building might have taken hours or days worth of change planning. Now it takes us longer to raise the paperwork, run it, and go through a change board process and it does to execute the intent and turn it into an actionable service.
I think something I've just went to a session with hyper fabric and the ideas that hyper fabric has. Keep it really simple because Cisco ACI is a complex system and adopt some of the ideas behind hyper fabric, bring it to ACI that will be really beneficial. So as I said, automation is a great thing, but it's still, you need to have the background and the really complex stuff that happens behind the scenes to leverage the value of that solution. And by adding more simplicity to it, I think that will be a great thing. And also integrating with other applications in terms of the automation.
Kind of just like what I just covered where pushing out the configuration, it can be a little bit tedious to go through those steps to apply the template to a network profile and then apply that network profile to a group of switches at a specific site where I want to make a change, and I'm looking at this as more of a, it's a small change where I feel like the switch profiles in the network profiles are more of a grand template for the entire switch. Where I'm going testing, I'm just trying to make a minor adjustment to one little configuration, it becomes a little bit tedious.
Provided with the intensive fault isolation for the CISCO ACI, we are glad that we have this Data Center Solution in place and we will continue to renew as long as the future needed requirements are meet and more helpful features will be enabled in the future with the integration of security
The first impressions using the tool, led us to believe that it will be very helpful going forward. There's a lot of potential to implement other features in the network
You'll need a lot of training and hands on experience to get the most out of the product. There are a lot of very useful features in the ACI product. Often times there are a lot of ways to get to a solution for chalanges in the field. The solutions might be different eacht time. Knowing which one to implement is somtimes a challenge.
Cisco DNA Center is going to help us in security, simplicity and ease of administration. Cisco DNA Center is complete management and control platform that simplifies and streamlines network operations. Cisco DNA Center offers a single dashboard for every core function in your network. With this platform, IT can become more nimble and respond to changes and challenges faster and more intelligently.
It allways works. If there are problems with links going down by accident (say someone accidentally unpatches something they shouldn't have), we rarely miss more then one packet over the link. Also, using VPCs we are able to upgrade the software on the switches without the attached EPs ever noticing.
Day to day operations on Cisco ACI do not require much human intervention, the platform ticks over without any major faults. Being able to rapidly replicate the communication between two groups of machines across multiple sub networks speeds up new application delivery, and the integration into vmWare allows multiple teams within IT to work together to problem solve rapidly.
Cisco provides users and partners with a multitude of data for you to consume. I think that the stuff in the public domain goes a long way to assisting you find any answers you may need, plus insights and information from areas such as DevNet provide you with access to more than just the traditional release notes and the like
El soporte de CISCO DNA Center es muy bueno, responden a mis dudas pero no he tenido oportunidad de reportar un incidente o determinar un tiempo de respuesta critico. The support of CISCO DNA Center is very good, they answer my questions, but I have not had the opportunity to report an incident or determine a critical response time.
The Cisco ACI training provided by Cisco was in depth, covered all of our requirements, and allowed us to implement and maintain the platform without issues.
It was informative, but the labs were not available long enough for us to get intimately familiar with CCNA before it was closed. The course instructor was well informed and got us as close to ready as she could.
Being involved in the implmentation gives you more overview on how things are supposed to be working and communicating, you can easily performce troubleshooting and understanding the troubleshooting scenario
Actually we start our learning in networking career with Cisco. So it is very useful or easier to learn this product. And honestly speaking, I didn't work in any other data center solution other than Cisco. So I cannot compare what it gives us more than other popular stuff. But this is very nice product like from Cisco.
It did a lot of good things for us. But the capabilities that we used it for were just probably a lot of what we're using it for right now, which is upgrades and configuration pushes to all of our gear, but it doesn't have quite the robust features that I've learned about this week. So as far, I'm still pretty new in the network world. I've only been doing the job for seven years, so I've really only known Cisco products and I haven't reviewed anything outside of Cisco, but just from what I've worked on and they've all done what I've needed them to do. And with Catalyst Center it'll do even more
Cisco ACI scales well and is suited in scenarios such as multi-cloud or large data centre implementations. It is not suited to smaller deployments as the efficiencies that it provides are not fully realised. It is well suited in large environments that contain both virtual and bare-metal machines allowing a great deal of flexibility. It is also perfect to support multi-tenancy platforms.
We've definitely spent quite a bit of time relearning how to do things in ACI, but I think the investment has been well worth while considering that we can now deploy tenants and leaves from the ground up in a matter of seconds.
We can if we choose to upgrade an entire datacenters worth of switches in a single night. (We've chosen to break it up for availability requirements, but if you didn't require 99.999% uptime like us you may be able to do it)
Well, it's hard to justify because the University is not a profit organization and people usually ask us for dollar value, but we don't have one. As long as their reputation is good, the students are happy, and the experience on the campus from a student and academics are good - I think that's a success for us.
