Cisco Advances Intent-based Networking for Data
Center and Private Cloud Environments
with New ACI Capabilities
Multi-site scalability, container integration and enhanced
security features enable customers to accelerate their multi-cloud
journey
Cisco today announced updates to its Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI),™ the industry leading Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution that
makes it easier for customers to adopt and advance intent-based
networking for their data centers. With the latest software release (ACI
3.0), more than 4,000 ACI customers can increase business agility with
network automation, simplified management, and improved security for any
combination of workloads in containers, virtual machines and bare metal
for private clouds and on-premise data centers.
The transitions occurring in the data center are substantial.
Enterprises experience an unrelenting need to accelerate speed,
flexibility, security and scale across increasingly complex data centers
and multi-cloud environments.
“As our customers shift to multi-cloud strategies, they are seeking
ways to simplify the management and scalability of their environments,”
said Ish Limkakeng, senior vice president for data center networking at
Cisco. “By automating basic IT operations with a central policy across
multiple data centers and geographies, ACI’s new multi-site management
capability helps network operators more easily move and manage workloads
with a single pane of glass – a significant step in delivering on
Cisco’s vision for enabling ACI Anywhere.”
The new ACI 3.0 software release is now available. New features include:
- Multi-site Management: Customers can seamlessly
connect and manage multiple ACI fabrics that are geographically
distributed to improve availability by isolating fault domains, and
provide a global view of network policy through a single management
portal. This greatly simplifies disaster recovery and the ability to
scale out applications.
- Kubernetes Integration: Customers can deploy their
workloads as micro-services in containers, define ACI network policy
for these through Kubernetes, and get unified networking constructs for
containers, virtual machines, and bare-metal. This brings the same level
of deep integration to containers ACI has had with numerous
hypervisors.
- Improved Operational Flexibility and Visibility: The
new Next Gen ACI User Interface improves usability with new consistent
layouts and simplified topology views, and troubleshooting wizards. In
addition, ACI now includes graceful insertion and removal, support for
mixed operating systems and quota management, and latency measurements
across fabric end points for troubleshooting.
- Security: ACI 3.0 delivers new capabilities to
protect networks by mitigating attacks such as IP/MAC spoofing with
First Hop Security integration, automatically authenticating workloads
in-band and placing them in trusted security groups, and support for
granular policy enforcement for end points within the same security
group.
“With ‘ACI Anywhere,’ Cisco is delivering a scalable solution that
will help position customers for success in multi-cloud and multi-site
environments,” said Dan Conde, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy
Group. “ACI’s new integration with container cluster managers and its
enhancements to zero trust security make this a modern offering for the
market, whether you are a large Service Provider, Enterprise, or a
commercial customer.”
Cisco customers worldwide derive value from ACI:
Tiger Resorts, Okada Manila
Okada Manila, the new luxury resort by Tiger Resorts, relies on its
IT Infrastructure to run the critical applications that deliver a
world-class experience for its customers, including hotel booking and
phone systems, casino gaming applications, retail applications, and
administrative applications. The IT team selected best-in-breed
technology for the new resort, including an integrated solution
combining Cisco ACI with Citrix NetScaler.
“Cisco ACI gave us a network backbone with agility to deploy services
for applications, load balancing, and network configurations in a very
easy, almost one-click process, while Citrix NetScaler provides load
balancing, application security and acceleration services. The
integrated solution improves the scalability and management of
applications and systems through just-in-time resource allocation and is
saving us a tremendous amount of labor and time as we get the resort up
and running.”
– Dries Scott, senior vice president of information technology, Okada Manila
Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA)
Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, a multinational banking group and
the second largest bank in Spain, provides financial solutions to 70
million customers globally.
“We have deployed both Red Hat Virtualization and Cisco ACI, and the
upcoming integration between their solutions will enable us to bring the
benefits of network virtualization and simplified operations to our
virtual farms, just as we’ve implemented for our OpenStack IaaS.”
– Raul Tomas, Architecture and Global Deployment, BBVA
Hutchinson Networks
Hutchinson Networks, a leading IT solutions provider of high-end
automated cloud solutions and network services, helps its customers
manage today’s complex data center environments.
“Cisco ACI underpins Fabrix, our public cloud platform - providing a
fast, resilient and automated software defined network. We are
benefiting from Cisco’s continuous investment in ACI and we are already
exploring new service offerings that will be enabled by Cisco ACI 3.0
features and multi-site designs in particular.”
– Stephen Hampton, CTO, Hutchinson Networks
World Wide Technology
WWT is an award-winning technology integrator and supply chain
solutions provider, bringing collaborative, innovative and proven
approaches to evaluate, architect and implement solutions.
“Multiple cloud environments, hosted facilities, mergers and
acquisitions make IT environments more complex every day, and we see ACI
as a solution that is helping to simplify that complexity,” said John
Duren, Practice Manager, Data Center Switching and Application Delivery,
World Wide Technologies. “As an early field trial customer that has
tested ACI 3.0 and the new multi-site features, we see Cisco delivering
on its promise of ‘ACI Anywhere,’ simplifying the interface and
providing consistency from a security and policy standpoint.”
Source: Cisco media announcement