Item: Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
Rating: 9
Author: Jared Lathrop

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're migrating off of the Old Nexus platform to a CI platform just to future-proof our data centers to allow better communication between data centers. Right now we use OTV with Nexus, so this is going to allow for easier transition between data centers.

Pros and Cons

Pros

So with the old one, we've had a secure zone, core zone, so we have special hardware specific for those zones, so security zones in our data center. This allows us to basically have the spine leaf and we could put any ports in any zone. So it allows a lot more, I'd say efficient use of equipment, being able to plug in things to whatever, and then program it to how you want it to work on.

Cons

Being how it's primarily, I know a lot of things can be scripted, but it is very much a gooey point and click administration. I think there needs to be people coming from a command line, mind type of deal going towards something like this. It's very slow, very cumbersome to make a lot of changes, so it'd be nice to be able to automate or be able to have those changes without having to learn scripting languages or at least have a path. For those of us who haven't learned those scripting waves yet.

Return on Investment

that's another one that's tough to answer since we're just now applying it.

Scalability

Well, since we're mainly in the implementation side, I would say time saved has not been recognized yet because we're moving things over and that's where the pain point of how slow configuring some of those profiles can be. So I'd say right now there hasn't been a time savings. I could see in the future there could be, but I couldn't say what it is now.

Automation

It hasn't, but I'm not sure it will in the way we're going to be using it.

Key Insights

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?

Yes

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

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

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

It was really well suited. Being able to configure, say like a, it's called the IPG and interface port profile group. So to be able to create a profile for a type of server and then implement that to a lot of different ports is a lot easier than going through and configuring every port to be configured as a certain profile. So it's a nice way of saying it's like, we have this type of server, it uses these VLANs and has these characteristics and we're going to just apply this towards all those things. That way when something changes, we have to change it once instead of in 20 different places.

Comments

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