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. …
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.
LAN, Storage network and compute were already Cisco so we moved from Nexus to Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure as natural alignment and simplified the dc operations.
My management chose after a deep evaluation involving the Cisco account manager and no one else. I was actually quite impressed by Aruba solutions but not in the position to correctly compare.
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.
Switching from NX OS to ACI OS made configuration easier after initial migration and getting to know ACI principles. There are no L2 loops and configuration mistakes as often as it used to be. There is only one management console, and policies are easily reused. The “Submit” …
The availability and support for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure is significantly better than that of other options that we have tested/implemented. Some features, however, are significantly more expensive, which at times has driven the need to use other clunkier …
I have used competitors fabric products, however they were unmanaged (no APIC) and manually configured. In this deployment model, all tasks are manual and there is no central controller to monitor and maintain the system. It's also prone to configuration errors as each leaf …
It’s native support to applications through Application centric mode it’s attractive when deploying in a private cloud environment and it’s ease integration to compute/VMM resources allows the deployment procedure to be much efficient. Also Cisco is a lead in the market that …
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.
NSX-T and ACI both are definitely awesome products. I tend to use ACI in networks that have more barebone and/or alternative hypervisors. NSX still works best in VMware heavy networks. Another consideration is where the network is managed, by which team. If the network is …
espaccially the Fabric Controller which was not in the List. But this tool really suprised me on that live. It is a better ACI for customers that don't do policy enforcement in their network.
Cisco ACI is well suited for the user environment like we have in which there are kind of the endpoints or servers are in thousands. So for those environment that is well suited but then in small environment it is not very helpful.
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.
Getting users up to speed can be especially challenging. I'm not sure how much of that if culture related vs technical skills related, but it's something to keep in mind.
Along those same lines, engineers who have spent years in the trenches with Catalyst or Nexus environment may struggle with troubleshooting an ACI environment.
We've had some issues with user errors causing the fabric to go into a virtually unrecoverable state and TAC not always knowing how to fix it.
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)
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
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.
I have used competitors fabric products, however they were unmanaged (no APIC) and manually configured. In this deployment model, all tasks are manual and there is no central controller to monitor and maintain the system. It's also prone to configuration errors as each leaf switch is individually managed. APIC solution is much better.
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.
