Cisco extends SDN leadership with new ACI capabilities

NEW DELHI: US technology company Cisco has launched its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to enhance its comprehensive SDN portfolio built on open APIs, open standards and a broad ecosystem for customer choice and flexibility.

New software capabilities enhance ACI with micro segmentation for both physical (bare metal) applications and multi vendor virtualized applications (VMware VDS,Microsoft Hyper-V)and extend ACI across multi-site environments to deliver policy-driven automation across multiple data centers.

Cisco also added integration of Docker containers through contributions to open source,offering customers a consistent policy model and greater deployment flexibility using the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).

“Expanding customer choice through a broad ecosystem, open APIsand contributions to open source, ACI now supports automated service insertion for any third party layer 4-7 service. Cisco also added new support for cloud automation tools like VMware vRealize Automation and OpenStack,including open standards-based Opflex support with Open vSwitch (OVS).New members of the ACI ecosystem enable the automation of entire application suites, including Platform as a Service (PAAS) and Software as a Service (SAAS), helping organizations to automate across their application and infrastructure teams,” the company said.

Cisco now has over 5000 Nexus 9000 ACI-ready customers using its open platformthat supportsany hypervisor, any cloud management platform, and any workload – whether physical, virtual, or container.

“Policy-based automation,consistent network security and central compliance support are critical for IT efficiency, business agility, and competitive advantage. Several ACI customers have achieved full automation of the network and are focusing on automation across their Layer 4-7network services, security and application groups as the next step,” said said Soni Jiandani, SVP at Cisco.

“This solution allows organizations to rapidly deploy applications through policy automation, easily insert multiple network services, and efficiently operate and manage their OpenStack cloud with APIC’s telemetry, analytics, and troubleshooting capabilities,” said said Prasad Dorbala, Vice President of Network Transformation, Sungard Availability Services.

In addition to CliQr, DataTorrent, and Vnomic, four new members that expand complete application and cloud services for ACI deployments have joined the ACI ecosystem: Apprenda, KillerIT, One Convergence and Science Logic. These new ecosystem members provide Platform as a service (PAAS) and are helping organizations to automate across their application and infrastructure teams. Together, Cisco and a broad ecosystem of industry leaders are delivering on the vision of SDN for end-to-end automation of the digital enterprise.