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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. IBM Terraform

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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

    IBM Terraform

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AIBM Terraform (formerly Hashicorp Terraform) is a cloud infrastructure automation tool used to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.

    $0

    Pricing
    Cisco ACIIBM Terraform
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Open Source
    $0
    Team & Governance
    $20/user
    per user/per month
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ACIIBM Terraform
    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 ACIIBM Terraform
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco ACI
    Cisco ACI is the only SDN fabric technology that has everything you need in a box. Code maturity, programmability and flexibility are huge plus of ACI
    Incentivized
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    113 Answers
    95%
    Would buy again
    21 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    20 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    115 Answers
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    21 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    93 Answers
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    18 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ACIIBM Terraform
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    AWS CloudFormation
    Score8.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ACIIBM Terraform
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (131 ratings)
    7.8
    (33 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.7
    (10 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    5.1
    (8 ratings)
    8.8
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (9 ratings)
    9.4
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.5
    (11 ratings)
    8.0
    (6 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.2
    (3 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (9 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ACIIBM Terraform
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job.
    • Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable.
    • Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
    • The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
    • Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Still the best provisioning tool out there and good support from the community as well in terms of shared knowledge
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    The syntax itself is pretty straightforward. The documentation is well-maintained & easy to follow. Most cloud providers, even smaller ones, maintain official provider libraries, making discovery & learning a breeze. Some, like GCP, even provide high-level libraries on top of their own more primitive provider, making building complex infra much more manageable. The language itself is cloud-agnostic, so you can literally manage resources from multiple providers in a single Terraform repo.
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Implementation is straight forward. Never had issues as the team is already very familiar with Terraform installation from previous projects and roles
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    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)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
    • having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
    • if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
    • writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    IBM Terraform Screenshots

    Screenshot of Terraform StateScreenshot of Terraform RunsScreenshot of Terraform VariablesScreenshot of Terraform WorkspacesScreenshot of Terraform Cost Estimation