ACI Review
November 14, 2020

ACI Review

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

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)

ACI is being rolled out as a new DC fabric to consolidate and simplify a legacy networking estate. Currently, the deployment is not running in the full-blown Application policy-based routing model. This will be a later phase once the under lying technology is remediated. Ansible is being used in conjunction with ACI to simplify change on the Nexus estate.

Pros

  • The APIC controller is a really powerful tool within the ACI stack.
  • Write once, deploy every where from a single command is key to driving efficency.
  • The ability to use 3rd party tools to supplement ACI is also key.

Cons

  • Cost is always a challenge and ACI is no different.
  • The linkage between ACI and Tetration has been rebranded since the initial marketeering of it and this has caused confusion and in some cases diminished the business case as a result.
  • The fact that Cisco has developed multiple Orchestrators of their differing network stacks causes issues when trying to pull together a singular approach to orchestration across a Cisco e-2-e network in an Enterprise.
  • The positive is that it allowed our customer to make inflight changes to a mainframe service through use of the SD Fabric, if they were on the legacy network this would have been far harder to achieve and taken a lot longer.
  • The negative impact on the ROI is it has taken a lot longer to deploy the equipment in to the estate than was originally forecast and as such the benefits case has been diminished.
Through creating run books and using Ansible Tower to automate the deployment of them on to ACI has seen a real efficiency step change within the customer estate. The customer has also integrated their FTD estate into the ACI fabric as part of their security strategy to connecting to 3rd parties.
Cisco provides users and partners with a multitude of data for you to consume. I think that the stuff in the public domain goes a long way to assisting you find any answers you may need, plus insights and information from areas such as DevNet provide you with access to more than just the traditional release notes and the like

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

Not sure

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

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

No

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

Yes

The programmability of the solution and the availability of the 3rd party integrations is why I rate ACI in this manner. There are always improvements that can be made but on the whole it is good.
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.

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