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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure review
February 13, 2024

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure review

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

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)

L2 connectivity between EPs and external router, managed by EPGs. VPC connections for servers.
3 pod cluster, 40 leaf switches.
  • Feedback on connection problems. Be it layer 1 through 4, it'll warn us when something is wrong.
  • Adoption of new topology. The way in which LLDP works together with the rest of the fabric makes this very easy.
  • Setting up VPCs. It's not difficult at all.
  • The APIC web UI is slow. Even on the newer UCS systems it is laggy.
  • The terminology for some of the objects is really confusing for someone that never used Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure. It would be at least helpful if there would be a link to a reference of the "classical" terms in the web UI.
  • The cost of the hardware, together with the management platform, is high. It is difficult to convince my management layer why the ease of manageability outweighs the high price.
  • Pos: The time it takes to provision the changes we make in the infra. Out other business units can continue their work faster.
  • Pos: The stability of the platform as a whole. We never had an outage because of the system.
  • Neg: TCO is very high. We still need to buy new stuff when it gets too old.
I have not selected Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure. I only just started working with it. But speaking from a classical networking background, the possibilities are endless.
The use of LLDP for the discovery, followed by the adoption in the fabric is a breeze. I really like the way it 'just works.'
Sorry, it has not. Our organization is not that agile (yet).

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

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

Yes

It is a great tool to do full end to end automation within a datacenter. Also when integrating the physical routing and switching world with the connected hypervising platforms like esxi or docker.
If none of these integrations are possible, or when the mutations in infra are sparse, I think the price isn't worth it.