ACI review from a VAR
June 29, 2018

ACI review from a VAR

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure

I am with a VAR, and we have deployed Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) a few times for customers. Most times it is a POC or POV, but sometimes in production. Due to the staggering differences between ACI and traditional Cisco networking, I find most customers prefer a phased approach.
  • Allows for automated provisioning in the DC
  • Forces collapse of silos and encourages co-mingling of teams in IT
  • Telemetry around applications
  • The UI. To get large scale adoption we MUST make the UI a go-to console for traditional network engineers. It is getting better, but still needs improvements.
  • Best practices and more wizards to get the day to day items done.
  • Better training from real world installers.
  • We have had pretty good success with the product in PoVs and installs
  • The pro-serve on it is nice.
  • Some customers have been frustrated with the UI and it has not gone past PoC.
NSX is much easier to use but is expensive and the VMware teams usually do not want to support it.
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.