Item: Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it as the core network in our data centers. We are currently having three colo locations where we have one pod so we could do multi pod Cisco ACI one pod in each data center and it's the core network for everything the business does.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It is up handling VMs and so on because of the any cost domains that our users, the virtualization and server admins can switch around where they want their machine machines to reside. That's a really good thing to have with SEI but also to have an API to work with and be able to automate some of the tasks like contracts and interface lectures that we have done that really helped us lot.

Cons

I think Cisco API needs some more work. You still need to do some things with more queries and so on and that's really hard to come around. You can't do everything you like. So I think Cisco API together with taking in how the MO queries works should be a good improvement at least for getting more traction for infrastructure as code and so on. Even though you have Terraform with the provider, Cisco ACI and so on still just to fine tune what you want to do is could be a good way to extend that API

Return on Investment

The positive was able to do to get some formal self-service to our server admins when they're setting up new machines and together with orchestration on server we could also do Ansible playbooks to set up new EPG and the server net support together with their orchestration. So that really helped us. Something that's hinder us has been that we were not early but quite early adapter of ACI. So we have had to dig through a lot of bug during the years.

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

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

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

I feel that Cisco ACI is quite good at different architecture designs. You can have it as just a straight layer two network. You can have it like we have with a vast layer three network and I think just for the layer three network it has easen up the use. I think the use cases for layer three networking is better for ACI. If you just want to do the layer two, you can still use Cisco Nexus and so on and that should be almost simpler in some way.

Comments

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Cisco ACI Review