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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. HAProxy Community Edition

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco ACI

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/ACisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.N/A

    HAProxy Community Edition

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/AHAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.

    $0

    Pricing
    Cisco ACIHAProxy Community Edition
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ACIHAProxy Community Edition
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco ACIHAProxy Community Edition
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Open Source
    Chose HAProxy Community Edition
    The cost is significantly lower and personally I don't find one to be harder to learn than the other. Overall they features stack up pretty closely and I'd pick HAProxy wherever it was feasible and we can save a tremendous amount of money for the business. The NetScalers & …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    113 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    115 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    93 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ACIHAProxy Community Edition
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ACIHAProxy Community Edition
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (131 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.7
    (10 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    5.1
    (8 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (9 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.5
    (11 ratings)
    9.7
    (2 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (9 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ACIHAProxy Community Edition
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    The ACI solution is perfectly fit for a large or multi-site data center environment. It permits simplifying deployment, management, automation, and security. ACI is especially valuable when strong scalability, automation, security, and segmentation are required. However, ACI is less suitable for a small environment due to its complexity and high cost.
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    Open Source
    It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
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    Pros
    Cisco
    • 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.
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    Open Source
    • Low-Cost Load Balancer
    • Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI
    • Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc.
    • SSL Termination
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    Cons
    Cisco
    • 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.
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    Open Source
    • A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    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
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    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Cisco
    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.
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    Open Source
    It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
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    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    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.
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    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Cisco
    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.
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    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    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
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    Open Source
    We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
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    In-Person Training
    Cisco
    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.
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    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    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
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    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    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.
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    Open Source
    We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
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    Scalability
    Cisco
    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.
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    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • 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)
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    Open Source
    • Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
    • Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.
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