Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC

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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One scenario that immediately came to my mind was large-scale data processing, IBM Cloud Virtual Servers is well-suited for organizations that require high-performance computing capabilities, particularly when processing large amounts of data. It can also be useful for companies or organizations that wish to migrate their workplace to the cloud and it may suite companies that have strict compliance requirements since the servers have robust security features.

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• 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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• Scalability: IBM Cloud Virtual Servers enable businesses to simply and quickly scale up or down the resources they require in response to changing business demands. This enables firms to respond to traffic spikes, requests for new services, or changes in business size without the need for additional hardware purchases or maintenance.
• Cost savings: By employing virtual servers in the cloud, enterprises can decrease capital expenditures for hardware and infrastructure while also lowering ongoing operational expenses by removing server maintenance and management costs. This can result in significant cost savings for enterprises, particularly those that need to raise or decrease their computer capacity fast and easily.
• High availability: IBM Cloud Virtual Servers is built with high availability in mind, giving enterprises the certainty that their applications and data will be available and accessible even if hardware fails or other disruptions occur. This assists enterprises in maintaining business continuity and lowering the chance of downtime, which is crucial for firms that rely on 24/7 access to their systems. Furthermore, IBM's comprehensive network and security features aid in the prevention of data breaches and other security risks, assuring the availability and reliability of their applications and data.

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• 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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• It would also be nice if there were more templates to choose from when creating a server. Right now there are only a few options, and we'd like to see more variety.
• We'd like to see the ability to create server groups. This would make it easier to manage a large number of servers since we could do all of the updates and management tasks for them at once.
• There doesn't seem to be a way to automatically install updates on all of the virtual servers. We have to go in and manually update each one, which can be time-consuming. It would be really nice if automatic updates can be done.

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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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It has a flexible and affordable pricing, easy to configure and manage. It is easy to spawn one or multiple instances and have them up and running in no time

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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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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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Always available when you need an instance.

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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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Most of the instances work on hypervisors with good processors, but not all of them.

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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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It is adequate, but you need to be ready to argue your point - which is fair enough, I suppose, but being given the opposite of the benefit of the doubt every time does not necessarily result in an enjoyable user experience.

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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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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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We did not use IBM professional services to implement IBM Cloud Virtual Servers.

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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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IBM Cloud Virtual Servers offer more customization options than Amazon EC2, with the ability to select from a range of operating systems, storage types, and network configurations. IBM also provides a wide range of tools and services to help manage and optimize your virtual servers, including a web-based console, CLI, and API.

AWS EC2 is a more managed platform, with a focus on providing a simple and easy-to-use interface. Amazon provides a range of predefined instance types, each with different specs and pricing, to make it easy to find the right option for your needs. AWS also offers a number of management and monitoring tools, but these are often more basic than what is available from IBM.

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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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It worked well for us in the beginning, it works well for us when we have more instances.

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• 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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• Supports businesses who want compute power on demand (instances are ready within minutes).
• It can give you access to a 32-core CPU at $0.29 for short running or interruptible processes - enabling cost-efficient number crunching.
• Given me a taste of the powers of remote compute power for compilation and development.

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