Cisco ACI

ACI is more mature compare to other cloud and fabric products. It's proven on the Cisco nxos and the engineers have the flexibility of knowing the system. Compared to the competition, TAC support is better for Cisco and the documentation covers good use cases. Power to extend it to other DC and clouds is also another factor in our decision.

The main reason we decided to go with Cisco ACI over VMware NSX was that with ACI we could still connect physical networks, therefore, utilizing ACI as our complete data center switching platform. NSX was really only a solution for virtualized networks.

With Cisco ACI you get a solution with a single vendor, NSX is only software, so the physical layer will always have to be from another vendor.

have looked at other SDN but ACI is fastest and easiest to implement

AWS is similar to ACI and has some nicer features, but they do work well together to provide the hybrid cloud model for redundancy.

ACI is a secure and advanced data center infrastructure, however, it is easy to manage and administrator s can turn up new services within minutes. This is a best in class solution.

As a Cisco house, we did not evaluate any other products.

An alternative to ACI would be to use VMware NSX-T. The advantage of NSX-T is that the micro-segmentation is implemented with a distributed firewall and not with ACL. The disadvantages are that you would still need an additional pyhsical network as underlay that has to be managed independent of the overlay and that you can only integrate virtualised systems that are supported from the product and bare metal workload that has additional software installed to support NSX-T.

With ACI underlay and overlay are configured with the same REST API and all devices can be integrated.

Multi-pods only with Cisco ACI.

We did not test alternatives, as this is the only software solution that had deployed for this type of service. It was due to the fact that our current platform and data center are composed of this vendor's hardware and techonology, and we wanted the ease in integration to this application.

Enable full automation of physical and virtual network.
Legacy network devices can be physically connected to the fabric.
Hardware routing is much more efficient than a software only network.
Faster convergence.

ACI and DNA are all very tightly integrated as it stands today. So using one with another only increases the overall benefits, when you are using the overall Cisco Stack of NGFW, ISE, ACI, Assurance engine, and Tetration (which is another product, we plan to evaluate)

Cisco ACI is better since it provides more common solutions than vendor specific solutions

Cisco is Cisco. You have the ecosystem and you have end-to-end technology line-up and the integrations against the rest of the portfolio. No other vender has broad view.

NSX is much easier to use but is expensive and the VMware teams usually do not want to support it.

Lower cost than FabricPath, maybe a little bit cheaper than Arista when we looked into it. I wasn't involved in the initial purchasing of ACI, and was kind of against it at first, but the product has evolved a lot over the last few years and I now believe that it can definitely have a positive impact.

We were initially planning to replace our Nexus 7K infrastructure with Nexus 7700 devices when we were introduced to ACI. We were running out of time with the Nexus 7K replacement and we were not able to compare with any other SDN/NFV applications out there in the market. Between the option of running Nexus 9K in NX-OS mode and ACI mode, we chose to venture into a new technology.