Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.
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Microsoft System Center
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Microsoft System Center is an enterprise-grade IT Operations Management (ITOM) suite designed for the centralized administration of data center infrastructure, virtualized environments, and hybrid cloud workloads. The platform provides unified management across heterogeneous environments, including support for Windows Server, Linux, and Azure Stack HCI.
System Center is Microsoft's ITOM stack for organizations that maintain a significant on-premise footprint, vs the company's Azure-based…
I have worked with NX OS, with traditional deployment with leaf and spine architecture, and also worked with ACI deployed environment, the only difference I could say is traditional network has simple and widely known design while ACI offers the Centralised control and better …
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) allows much more customization than others. Its also fully on prem which some might like. Cloud vision is a close 2nd...its a solid product and works very well.
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Cisco Nexus dashboard is very easy to manage when compared to the Arista products. And trouble shooting is very easy via Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and it is very hard to t/s via Arista command …
We have selected ACI because it’s the most powerful solution for network deployment and management. Cisco ESA, FortiGate, and Panorama are each the best solution in their respective fields, and they all fit perfectly with the Cisco ACI solution. It permits automating network …
I do not found any solution that has the same maturity of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) with other constructors. I tried Nexus Dashboard fabric controller to try similar usage with nx-os mode and evpn vxlan. NDFC is quiet near to Cisco Application Centric …
There are just a few contributors to Cisco ACI and as an engineer you usually dont have chance to work with all of them. But I can compare Cisco ACI to traditional VXLAN with EVPN deployments using Cisco NX-OS fabric and I can say it is totally different. In Cisco ACI there is …
SCCM is often considered superior to Intune because it is more predictable and transparent in day-to-day operations. Errors in SCCM are clearer and easier to troubleshoot, whereas Intune issues can feel vague and harder to diagnose. SCCM also offers rich, built-in features such …
Microsoft System Center really integrated with our windows system better than any other 3rd party product which obviously you would expect to a certain extent. Our main reason to procuring System Center (apart form the options)was licensing costs. We already had a Microsoft …
None. We are a Microsoft business, and this is THE tool for imaging, packaging, remote support, and antivirus management. Microsoft's tool is the best for managing its software, systems, and antivirus clients. I will say that Microsoft Intune, the cloud platform, can be used …
The capability of SCOM as far as monitoring Windows systems is concerned is far greater than any monitoring product out there as both are a Microsoft product so integration and discoveries work well and fast.
The versatility of the suite of application provided by the Microsoft experience center was way above the other competitors , it helped gained leverage over the other products in the market . That why we made the decision of choosing Microsoft system center as a infrastructure …
We use Azure, we have lisences, so we have no needs any other cost. And also, we want to save backup data in Azure. Veritas ask additional cost reagurally and have to rebuild bakcup environment.
Because Datadog was too small, we decided quickly to use Microsoft System Center. We use a lot of other Microsoft products so that discussion was quickly set internally.
We have used Ghost from Symantec (licensed), FOG and Clonezilla which are freeware products. All three products had their pros and cons. The two freeware products were functional but did lack some polish, and Ghost was a good product for imaging of desktop computers. All did …
We previously used a mix of FOG and Clonezilla to image machines. The biggest issues with these products is that changing one piece of the image required you to rebuild the entire image itself. These pieces of software also did not allow you to manage applications and Windows …
We are using Microsoft products for a long time, so the overall confidence played a part in the decision, the feature set and licensing cost was also very high when compared with above products, so we decided to use System Center for our environment, so far it has solved many …
We selected it simply because it is less expensive than the competition, but yet just as good. We saw no reason to go outside the walls of Microsoft for this task. We are satisfied with the product.
This was used to monitor uor non-Windows systems and was cumbersome. Their licensing was per device with how many agents you needed; however, with System Center Operations Manager, their billing was a lot easier for their product.
All comparative features are way expensive and complex to configure in all other competitors. Value to money and ease of deployment for Microsoft based environment
Microsoft System Center has more options. Microsoft System Center has the ability to image PCs as well as remotely connect to PCs, and software installation and patching where Symantec Ghost Solution Suite didn't handle all of these options as well. We haven't looked at many …
Much better UI for system center. Also, Tivoli was discontinued, so it was an easy decision. Altiris was acquired by Symantec but was unreliable and painful. It's UI was unresponsive and generally outdated. It wouldn't clean up old packages and would hog GB of disk space, …
SCOM is better than OMi for Windows-based servers monitoring. You need to know how to use Visual Studio to customize the management pack. Dynatrace is way better for all Application Performance Manager.
It has its similarities between the two from a ticketing standpoint but as a primarily Microsoft shop it is nice to have a product that was created to play along with other tools that we are using such as SCCM. We like Jira for the project management tools and Cherwell for …
It is an excellent product for monitoring features like Exchange, Active Directory, DNS. Monitors are custom designed and can be adjusted to any system. Great monitors can be created even when monitoring open-source systems.
How SCEP stacks up against some of the other AV solutions/products is that it does a pretty good job overall (not the best in the industry) at detecting/removing malware, which is the main focus for a product like this. It is also easy to use on the end-user side, which can't …
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.
We used a product before that was designed to prevent users making changes and saving files to the desktop computer. This required a renewal of the license. By using SCCM in our environment we were able to discontinue using that product because SCCM allows us to completely restore a machine back to the original configuration. We have taught our users to save their individual work on either a network drive or a cloud drive. By doing this, if we do a re-image of their machine they have lost no data, and it makes for a faster resolution. In some instances having a computer in our SCCM environment it can become cumbersome when creating new users for very specific purposes. It can be done by creating new organizational units and applying new policies but when in a pinch it can be frustrating. For the most part we have tried to make "new" purpose images and groups to at least accommodate a quick install.
So with the old one, we've had a secure zone, core zone, so we have special hardware specific for those zones, so security zones in our data center. This allows us to basically have the spine leaf and we could put any ports in any zone. So it allows a lot more, I'd say efficient use of equipment, being able to plug in things to whatever, and then program it to how you want it to work on.
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.
One of the biggest drawbacks to SCOM is the sheer scope and complexity of the system. This can be a pro and a con. The system is very customizable, what you put into it is what you'll get out of it. That said, the learning curve is fairly steep. An organization needs to be committed to putting time and resources into SCOM to get the most out of it. I've heard stories from colleagues of several different companies that invested in SCOM and then abandoned it due to the excessive time and care required.
SCOM is expensive. Not only is the enterprise licensing costly, SCOM requires it's own servers, operational and warehouse databases to be maintained.
The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.
Cisco ACI is doing exactly what was intended for it to do, that is support our next generation data centre, improve security, and increase resiliency. Migrating to another platform would be a waste of time, resource and energy, which could be better spent migrating more legacy applications into the Cisco ACI fabric.
Cisco ACI has changed the traditional data center model into a new era of automation and agility. The product was considerably easy to deploy met all the expectations. In terms of usability, ACI provides a unified interface for managing the whole infrastructure in one place which is the main benefit for users (admins)
It is not user-friendly for the most part. With IT infrastructure, sometimes it cannot handle excess requests. Every few months, you will need an upgrade in terms of server resources to keep up with incoming alerts and requests. This does not happen all of the time, but it does happen when there are too many requests.
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.
I do not give it 10 because the platform evolves more and more every day in the data traffic of the datacenter. But the implementations that they carry out for different clients of the platform are very happy with the result of the same over time. Another point that you notice about the platform, despite its good performance, is the low use of energy used by this 24x7 on, it is a good fact to take into account for our environment.
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
There is a fair amount of documentation out there to help you when you have questions or run into issues with this product as well as tutorials on some of the more common tasks. Between the documentation and the overall ease of use we haven't had to deal with direct Microsoft support for this product.
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.
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
We have selected ACI because it’s the most powerful solution for network deployment and management. Cisco ESA, FortiGate, and Panorama are each the best solution in their respective fields, and they all fit perfectly with the Cisco ACI solution. It permits automating network tasks for both virtual and physical environments. Cisco ACI is perfect with Fortinet, Palo Alto, and, of course, Cisco devices.
None. We are a Microsoft business, and this is THE tool for imaging, packaging, remote support, and antivirus management. Microsoft's tool is the best for managing its software, systems, and antivirus clients. I will say that Microsoft Intune, the cloud platform, can be used for those with heavy 365 usage, but for us, that does not meet our current company needs.
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.
The positive one, I mean because before the Catalyst 9800 wireless hand controller, there was another version, I can't remember the name. It was quite, the web UI was very not up to date, but with the 9800, it was a pretty web view user interface. Nothing there was also integrated some API where you could make API calls to the 9800 to configure it. That was a positive negative. I can't think of anything really negative about it.
The positive impact it has had on ROI is that it has been a solid AV product in our environment, meaning it has worked well when running on client computers. It doesn't use a lot of system resources on the client-side, so that helps end-users productivity of not being slowed down.
It has been good for the end-user, since they really don't need to take additional training or consult user manuals, in how to use the product.
