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Cisco ACI

Cisco ACI

Overview

What is Cisco ACI?

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.

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Recent Reviews

Faster Deployment

9 out of 10
February 05, 2024
Incentivized
We have been use Cisco ACI for 4 years. We have pods logic, with 3 pods. In each Pods we have one or more pairs of LBA and FW with PBRs or …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is Cisco ACI?

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

What is Cisco ACI?

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI®) is presented as a secure, open, and comprehensive Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution, enables automation that accelerates infrastructure deployment and governance, simplifies management to move workloads across a multi-fabric and multicloud frameworks, and proactively secures against risk arising from anywhere. It's goal is to simplify, optimize, and expedite the application deployment lifecycle.

Cisco ACI Features

  • Supported: Enable automation to accelerate infrastructure deployment and governance
  • Supported: Simplify management to move workloads across a multi-fabric and multicloud framework
  • Supported: Proactively secure against risk
  • Supported: Identify performance issues in the network before they happen
  • Supported: Transform IT operations from reactive to proactive

Cisco ACI Video

Cisco ACI Explained

Cisco ACI Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.

VMware NSX, Palo Alto Panorama, and IBM Cloud Internet Services are common alternatives for Cisco ACI.

Reviewers rate Performance and Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.1.

The most common users of Cisco ACI are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(149)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-5 of 5)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use ACI fabric as primary Datacenter Infrastructure. We use SDN model for internal apploications and multicloud environment.
Flexibility and High availability for strategic compute and data resources are the main goal of the ACI infrastructure
  • High availability
  • programmability
  • Infrastructure as a service
  • Integration with third party compute
  • Storage management
ACI is completely suited for modern datacenter and Hybryd cloud scenarios.
ACI is not so good in conventional environemtn where VLAN switching is the only required transport service
  • ROI is good
  • Pay as you grow approach is feasible
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
Time saving and pay as you grow is absolutely a plus
We created a bunch of code to complete automatically tasks that where executed by hand
1
datacenter architect
1
Datacenter architect and networking specialist
  • Datacenter
  • SDN
  • Cloud
  • Service graph
  • Esg and microsegmentation
  • Intent based routing
  • Hybrid cloud
  • Distributed datacenter
  • Business continuity
ACI is the most robust and mature datacenter SDN platform
Yes
  • Cloud Solutions
  • Scalability
  • Other
I can do anything again as I've done
few open support case all closed with briliant sokution and in a really short time
No premium support available
when i was unable to see my multicast traffic and the TAC engineer fixed my issue in few seconds
Simple only if you have an SDN approach
  • Service graph
  • Contract
No
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
My organization has migrated from the traditional NX-OS tiered networking architecture to ACI allowing us to provide a higher level of redundancy, while also streamlining services.
  • more network Redundancy
  • automation for provisioning access ports
  • easier fault isolation
  • graphical user interfaces
  • bridging the manual input into automated responses
Cisco ACI is definitely well suited for larger companies that host data center environments. I cannot see the advantage for smaller organizations.
  • Cisco ACI definitely a positive ROI for our organization. It has been deployed twice for our collocated data center environments.
  • Provision mass access ports through automation has produced a good experience
ACI makes data center deployments easier, upgrades, overall simpler functionality.
Currently we have only tapped on the basic features of ACI, it gives us more options than the old NX-OS 3 tier architecture.
ACI automation is a life saver, automation saves thousands man hours.
20
Network Engineering
10
Network Engineering background
  • Provides better scalability
  • Provides more resilient redundancy
  • Able to consolidate network functions
  • None that I am aware of , our initial roll out is very simple
  • We will be integrating Nexus Dashboard soon
My organization is current has two major ACI deployments.
Yes
ACI replace the standard NX-OS 3 tiered architure.
  • Cloud Solutions
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
Unfortunately I am on the Network Delivery Team, the Network Infrastructure team is tasked with architecture changes.
N/A
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled
We are still implementing
  • Testing
  • provisioning
Not applicable
The Cisco TAC cases we have opened, my organization has received very good overall support.
Not sure of the level support for ACI
No
One-time our organization had to enable the DOM feature for the ACI fabric. THe turn around with an easy script to deploy was simple and easy to implement.
I had zero ACI experience and or formal training, but have been able to pick up through on the job training and videos.
  • Once you learn the constructs of ACI, navigating through the GUI is not difficult.
  • manual port provisioning for more than 10 devices.
Mark Healey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use Cisco ACI as the fabric for our next generation data centre. The platform is managed by the Network Team within our IT department, and hosts all of the internal application we use, as well as providing secure access to applications on the Police National Network, private and public clouds, and the Internet at large.
  • Security being at the heart of Cisco ACI made it the perfect choice.
  • The web management GUI is intuitive and feature rich.
  • Troubleshooting and fault finding facilities are excellent.
  • Some parts of ACI are very complex to understand and implement.
  • Upgrades are complicated and difficult to implement.
  • Third Party Support is hard to come by.
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.
  • Cisco ACI has had a major positive impact on our core direction to embed security in everything we do.
We have been able to implement service insertion Cisco ASA firewalls directly into the fabric, to allow extra security around traffic that is allowed between two end points. This allows load balancing and traffic inspection from layer 4 upwards, rather than just relying upon the layer 3 security baked into Cisco ACI itself.
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.
Zero-trust security is baked into the core of Cisco ACI. Two machines cannot communicate unless you specifically allow them to, and only on the specific ports and in the specific direction you allow. There is no lateral movement allowed across the network, and even if a single machine was compromised, it would not be possible to leverage that to compromise other machines in the same data centre.
As a Cisco house, we did not evaluate any other products.
7
Cisco ACI is managed and maintained by the Network team, with input from the Server and IT Security Teams.
7
Cisco ACI is managed and maintained by the Network team, with input from the Server and IT Security Teams.
  • We use this for installation of all new applications.
  • We have improved security of some of our legacy applications by moving them into ACI.
  • We will soon be implementing a second Cisco ACI data centre, to extend the fabric over the WAN, providing better resiliency.
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.
  • in-person training
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.
We have yet to experience an unplanned outage of the platform.
August 19, 2020

Is ACI good?

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used as a platform for private cloud & tenanted & connected into the MPLS cloud per customer. We used it for customers that did not want to go to public cloud & it has worked out cheaper for them than using AWS or GCP versions. We price it as a fixed price model with no usage-based costs.
  • Easy to sell
  • Easy to configure via single dasboard
  • Ideal for private cloud & trusted locations
  • Interoperability of physical and virtual workloads
  • Takes a while to learn to use - has some new approaches
  • Application visibility could be better
  • Not enough experienced people that can drive the tech
Cisco ACI is good for small to medium business environments.
  • Extremely positive ROI - It has enabled us to productise a modern & scalable private cloud.
  • Selling private cloud has extended the life of core MPLS business.
  • Has allowed the introduction of SDWAN with private cloud.
no issues (that I know of)
easy to scale
Great Cisco support
50
actually its tenanted & our customers use it ,,,
5
cloud & Data centre skills
  • Private Cloud for our MPLS customers
  • hosting of goverment data
  • hosting of multitenant firewall for managed firewall as a service
  • not sure if its innovative
  • migrate legacy apps that cannot be moved to Hypescale Clouds
  • stand up customer virtual firealls & SBCs close to the internet & voice gateways
fit for purpose product
Yes
Dells servers acting as private cloud
  • Price
  • Product Usability
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
Amazingly the price was actually right
i would not
  • Don't know
  • internal teams
product deployed & implemented as intended
No
I am in Pre-Sales not support
  • no strong opinios here
  • no opinion
from what i saw during training & watching our support engineers, its not too hard
no outages
Joacim Wicander | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I help other companies implement Cisco ACI at their data center. From design to implementation and support. Mainly Cisco ACI is used by the IT-department. Cisco ACI solves/helps solve SDN in the data centers, and it really helps with faster deployments of services in the data centers.
  • High-Speed DC networking.
  • Extremely well suited for automation.
  • Simple to add new switches in the DC.
  • The GUI needs to be simpler, it is good but many fields don't need to be filled in.
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.
  • Faster implementation of new networks in the DC.
  • Fewer faults in the DC, both on networking and the server.
5
We are all consultants who help the customer design and implement Cisco ACI in their DC.
5
The learning curve is steep when you start with ACI, but it's really worth it when you start to grasp the concepts behind ACI.

The typical consultant who designs and implements ACI is good in routing, switching and some security.
  • SDN in the DC.
  • Automation.
Cisco ACI is a leader in the DC networking market and is releasing new products and software on a regular basis. Also, the support around ACI and systems integrated with ACI, like VMware, Kubernetes, etc is extremely good.
Not Sure
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Vendor Reputation
Customers want the automation feature, and as Cisco ACI is built around the open Rest API. It is supremely suited for this task.
N/A
  • Third-party professional services
I am a consultant at Conscia Netsafe, so I'm one of the guys doing the implementation at the customer site.
Yes
  1. Design.
  2. PoC.
  3. implementation.
  4. Test/verification.
  5. Connection of legacy DC network and Cisco ACI.
  6. Migration of servers, firewalls, load balancers, etc into Cisco ACI.
  7. Migration of DC-networking into Cisco ACI.
  8. Segmentation of DC-networks, creating files for how the EPGs are allowed to communicate (mostly done with Contracts in Cisco ACI but also done in external firewall).
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
  • Hitting BUGs.
  • Insufficient training of network engineers.
The following are extremely important when implementing Cisco ACI:
  • Design phase
  • Naming scheme
  • Documentation
Yes
Our customers do, most of them buy solution support for the controllers (APIC) and that way they can have total coverage of anything in ACI and integrated systems like VMware, Kubernetes, etc.
Yes
Yes
Every time i open a case with Cisco, which is not often, i always get exceptional support from the TAC-engineers.
Extremely well-trained engineers and professional in their handling of support cases.

If the issue is really bad, the case follows the sun, i.e. if the issue isn't resolved by the TAC-engineer in Europe the case will be reassigned to an engineer in the USA and so on. this makes Cisco TAC really responsive and customers love this.
  • Deploying multiple servers with the same networking config.
  • Integrating VMware, Kubernetes, etc
  • Automation of DC networking.
Cisco ACI is extremely competent in handling everything for the DC-networking and if the customer wants to use things like load balancers, firewalls, etc these can be integrated with ACI and help with the config.
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