Cisco ACI

ACI is best suited for running your own cloud infrastructure and data center management. It is extremely competent in handling data center networking tasks (as an umbrella explanation), from load balancers to firewalls and so on. It also allows your to spread your applications for multiple and vast locations, whilst maintaining a centralized point of control.

Cisco ACI is well suited in any modern datacenter network infrastructure.

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure is the platform that can be implemented in cloud-based data center environments, powerful data migrations are performed by the IT team and robust end-to-end traffic controls are also performed, private cloud functions are executed with sierra difficult in general, but everything in Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure is difficult in the first instance, we just have to be patient.

It's well suited if you have multiple DC and if you want to stretch the VLAN across the DC. It's good for integration with vCenter as well. It's not so great if all the workloads are in a public cloud. It's well suited if there are mixed workloads i.e in private DC and in the cloud. Integration with micro-segmentation is a good use case.

Depending on the infrastructure a company currently had in place has a huge impact on this question. We found Cisco ACI to be the best option for us based on what we currently had in place. We were already using VMWare which integrated nicely with Cisco ACI and all of the networking was already Cisco so this transition was extremely nice.

According to the selected implementation (multisite or multipod) it is a very powerful tool where you can manage all the devices of a data center from single management. If we need a multisite solution we must add another product to manage the fabrics of each site.

Better scaling, lower power consumption, modular and standalone configurations

The API functions very well and once you get the process straight, it can be a scripting boondongle.

Where the application flows are well understood and documented, ACI can be delivered to its full potential quickly. This is not the case in a complex environment that needs a lot of data collection and discovery followed by analytics. This situation ends up delaying the ROI in any business case due to the upfront efforts to deliver the information.

Definitely well suited for high-performance and high-density networks in data centers where enterprise applications are hosted. It is also well suited as infrastructure for cloud-based service providers where automation and programmability is a key role to provide cloud services.

Cisco ACI is less appropriate in stretching remote branches for data center applications as this role is covered by another Cisco product SD-WAN.

Implementation of a new application into Cisco ACI, with all of the relevant groups of servers and storage, is very easy to carry out, as long as all of the communications between the servers are known. Migrating an existing application into the platform was found to be extremely difficult, as legacy applications are often built on a flat network, where this kind of information wasn't documented in the required depth.

It's well suited for very dynamic workload or virtualised workloads where there is constant change needed in the configuration of the network environment or firewall rules. If the firewall, like in our case is integrated in the SDDC and the EPG information is exchanged between ACI und Firewall there is an increased security as the firewall is not anymore depending on IP addresses. IPs removed from an EPG are immidately removed from the firewall rule.
For the old consistent parts like mainframe or storage it has less of an advantage as the necessary changes are very view.

Cisco ACI is well 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.

Datacenters with multiple pods and or multiple applications with different networks will be well organized with Cisco ACI. If you need firewall rules on single IP adresses, you will need an extra firewall. Otherwise, ACI would be perfect for zoning applications.

Cisco ACI is good for small to medium business environments.

Cisco ACI is best suited for Automation of overall environment and deployment. The other best use case is Integration with various other infrastructure platform using the REST API, which is easy to use and implement.
Governance reporting and alerting is another use case where it can hugely benefit the an overall governance model to be implemented and ensure a uniform and desired implementation platform.

Don't take in consideration ACI if you consider your own datacenter a bunch of CPUs connected with some hubs. Consider ACI if you want to run your own cloud infrastructure and you have skills available to run it. Programmable doesn't mean you set and forget.

Cisco ACI is extremely well suited in a medium to large data center, and it is always preferred to automate with tools like Ansible.

Cisco ACI is not very well suited for small data centers that have less than 4 switches because of the complexity and pricing.

Cisco ACI is sitting well in the center of your application strategy, since you can spread your applications for multiple locations and control those from centralized point. Still some improvements needed since vPOD and multi-site can't be on the same installation. I have heard that this should come soon in coming updates of the product.

Building your own private cloud.

If an organization is already Agile/Dev-Ops it is a great fit. Larger enterprises which are still heavily siloed often see it as too cumbersome.

ACI could be advantageous in a large homogenous network where you're needing to quickly deploy large numbers of servers/tenants/etc. But at a certain point you may start to run into some scale limitations like we have that have required us to modify our architecture a bit. It's been amazing for letting us quickly move VMs anywhere in the fabric without network engineers having to verify that VLANs are trunked to the switch the new ESX host is hanging off of. It's also been awesome for quickly deploying new leafs and new tenants especially when compared to our older methods on FabricPath and Catalyst.

It is well suited to network automation, private cloud, and DevOps scenarios. It is less appropriate in small data centers with a low degree of workload dynamism.