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Cisco ACI Review
January 28, 2020

Cisco ACI Review

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

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)

We changed our old Nexus switches in two data centers (stretched L2 design) to a Cisco ACI multi-pod design and it's now in production. Yes, you have to learn a lot of new things and it's totally different from what it was before. But it's worth it. We have added stability (no more STP in the fabric), centralized management (upgrades are now so easy) and security (it's much more easy to segment the data center).
  • Easier to segment a data center to add security.
  • Centralized management.
  • Ability to group EPGs together (more than one preferred group or vzAny) to reduce contracts.
  • Need a firewall to harness the full power of ACI, hard to play only with contracts.
  • Added security to data center.
  • Faster deployment of new services.
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.
Cisco ACI TAC team is very efficient and available. We opened several TAC cases during the implementation phase and they helped us to resolve the issues. TAC team usually used Webex remote session to help us.

Do you think Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) again?

Yes

Cisco ACI is well suited in a medium to large data center and in multi-cloud environment. It's perfect if you need multi-tenancy. It's also well suited if you have a mixture of virtual machines/bare-metal servers/private cloud/container platform.

Cisco ACI is not really designed for small data centers but Cisco always adds smaller spines to the compatible switches portfolio.

Using Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)

3 - Technical staff as network administrators / engineers