1. Home
  2. Software Defined Networking (SDN)
  3. Cisco ACI Reviews
  4. User Review of Cisco ACI
The Application Centric Approach
Updated December 07, 2016

The Application Centric Approach

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure

Cisco ACI is used for both internal and customer centric applications. Internal applications are used by a variety of teams within the organization. ACI is easy to provision and maintain and requires very less operational tasks on a daily basis. The initial configuration and design requires much thought.
  • Easy to provision/automate tasks
  • Integration with Virtualization and Compute environments
  • Easily scalable and manageable
  • Troubleshooting and visibility into packetflow and packet drops per interface
  • Packet capture to external systems in non ER-SPAN format
  • EPG based QoS verification
  • So far we havent been able to leverage al the positives of the ACI infrastructure like Open API and RBAC so it's difficult to comment.
  • A negative I would think of is the change in the design implementation for Datacenter Interconnectivity.
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.
Palo Alto Networks PA-5000 Series, F5 BIG-IP
Cisco ACI is well suited for Data Center environments which continuously grow and ones which need isolated environments for different tenants/customers/applications. It provides Tenant-level visibility and operation. It might not be well suited for small scale data centers where scalability and throughput aren't a concern and which do not require automation and integration with different compute and storage environments.