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Common Cisco ACI® overview questions
● Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).
● Cisco Nexus® 9000 Series spine and leaf switches for Cisco ACI.
● A flexible and yet highly available network that allows agile application deployment within a site, across sites, and across global data centers while removing the need for a complex Data Center Interconnect (DCI) infrastructure.
● Operational simplicity, with common policy, management, and operation models across application, network, and security resources.
● Centralized network management and visibility with full automation and real-time network health monitoring.
● Seamless integration of underlay and overlay.
● Open northbound APIs to provide flexibility for DevOps teams and ecosystem partner integration.
● A cloud-ready SDN solution.
● Common platform for managing physical and virtual environments.
● Automation of IT workflows and application deployment agility.
● Open APIs and a programmable SDN fabric, with 65+ ecosystem partners.
● Single policy and seamless connectivity across any data center and public cloud.
● Any hypervisor, any workload, any location, any cloud.
● Cloud automation enabled by integration with VMware vRealize Suite, Windows Azure Pack, OpenStack, Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes, and Cisco UCS® Director.
● Create business continuity and provide disaster recovery.
● Inherent security with a zero-trust allow list model and innovative features in policy enforcement, micro segmentation, and analytics.
● Integrated security with Cisco security products and ecosystem partners.
● Consistent security posture at scale across a multi cloud environment.
● “Our most critical workloads have all been segmented,” Stengård notes, “and that makes our security team very happy.” Johan Stengård, solution architect for IT networks at Skanska Construction.
● Automated network connectivity, consistent network operations, network visibility, and network control for workload migration and next-generation applications.
● Our Cisco ACI network is one of the largest data center fabrics in the world. It’s the ‘nerve center’ that provides connectivity between our subscribers and mobile services.” Ryota Mibu, Vice Division Manager, Cloud Platform, Rakuten Mobile.
● “Cisco ACI is supporting roughly 1000 leaves on a number of large underlay fabrics, and all of the policies are consistent. That type of standardization and software-defined automation is important for operational efficiency, knowledge sharing, and business agility—on a global scale.” Vivien Strady, Global Head of Data Center and Network, Société Générale.
● Agile resource elasticity with hybrid cloud networking.
● “We’re sticking with a hybrid model,” says Johan Stengård, solution architect for IT networks at Skanska Construction. “Some apps will be in the cloud, some will be on-prem, and others will be split between the two.”
● Cisco ACI infrastructure is easy to implement because of the way Cisco pre-configures the solution—much of the guesswork is removed from the deployment. Pre-configurations can remove the guesswork from your infrastructure deployments. A key goal in implementing Cisco ACI was to ensure that we had established an active backup data center environment while reducing our associated costs. We’ve also enabled Layer 3 networking in our environment because we want to use both data centers independent from each other while also allowing them to converge. If the service running data center A fails, then the same service also runs in data center B. We run this alongside a few Docker containers and some high-availability proxies that share the load of both data centers. This removes much of our anxiety around system failures, because if one data center fails, the services and other data centers can continue to run without requiring us to mediate.” Franz Matthies, Senior IT-Security Specialist at HYPOPORT AG.
● Business outcome:
◦ One place to easily understand the data center’s network, health, performance, redundancy, troubleshooting, and operational status.
● Metrics:
◦ Reduction in time for provisioning, configuration, troubleshooting, and upgrades.
◦ Reduction in configuration errors.
◦ Agility to change network elements that support applications, in lockstep with the application real-time lifecycle.
● Metrics:
◦ Reduction in time for business applications to be delivered and deployed.
◦ Reduction in time for network moves, additions, changes, and deletions.
● Business outcome:
◦ Doing more with less by leveraging the enhanced capabilities around API automation and service insertion that drive operational efficiencies.
● Metrics:
◦ Reduction in operational costs by automating routine tasks.
◦ More resource time for projects to advance the business.
● Business outcome:
◦ Application availability of 100 percent, regardless of data-center maintenance, migration, capacity, or other service interruption.
● Metrics:
◦ Application availability.
◦ Reduced risk of downtime.
● Business outcome:
◦ Enabling the business to gain agility from using the public cloud while reducing risk by uniformly applying network and security rules using the same toolset regardless of deployment.
● Metrics:
◦ Time savings.
◦ Acceleration of time to market.
◦ Reduction in errors.
◦ CapEx reduction.
● Business outcome:
◦ Visibility of network and security changes that meet compliance requirements.
● Metrics:
◦ Reduction of risk.
◦ Increased availability.
◦ Reduction of security incidents and number of unplanned changes.
● Cisco Nexus Dashboard: With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, you get a unified operations view across all your sites and services. Cisco Nexus Dashboard scales out based on the size and number of sites and the operational services used to manage them. It also provides the operations team with a simple and consistent way for service access control and lifecycle management of the unified operations’ infrastructure and services. Cisco Nexus Dashboard delivers unprecedented simplicity by integrating multiple data-center operational tools that deliver best-in-class automation and insights from a single pane of glass to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot the network. Along with a uniform onboarding experience for data-center sites and operational services such as Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights (formerly Nexus Insights), Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (formerly Multi-Site Orchestrator), Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker (formerly Nexus Data Broker), and third-party ecosystem applications, the operator now has a single landing page and a consistent user experience for the administrator and operator to manage the lifecycle of the infrastructure.
● Cisco ACI and AppDynamics®: This combined solution provides high-quality application performance monitoring, a rich diagnostic capability for application and network performance, and faster root-cause analysis of infrastructure anomalies. This will significantly reduce the time it takes to identify and troubleshoot end-to-end application performance issues.
● Cisco ACI and Cisco DNA-C/ISE: Automates the mapping and enforcement of segmentation policies based on the user’s security profile as they access resources within the data center. This enables security administrators to manage end-to-end, user-to-application segmentation seamlessly. As a result, any unauthorized or suspicious access to resources and potential threats can quickly be controlled and remediated.
● Cisco ACI and Cisco SD-WAN integration for branch offices (network edge): Through this integration, customers can automate WAN path selection between the branch office and the on-premises data center based on application policies. For example, traffic from a stock trader in a branch office in Chicago can be automatically sent over the fastest possible WAN link to access the trading application hosted in a data center in New York, based on the application policies and SLAs configured.
● Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).
◦ The infrastructure controller is the main architectural component of the Cisco ACI solution. It is the unified point of automation and management for the Cisco ACI fabric, policy enforcement, and health monitoring. The APIC appliance is a centralized, clustered controller that optimizes performance and unifies the operation of physical and virtual environments. The controller manages and operates a scalable multi-tenant Cisco ACI fabric. The on-premises ACI deployment has flexible deployment models for the APIC cluster, including a UCS server–based appliance for greenfield deployments, a virtual machine (VM) form factor in an existing ESXi/VMware footprint, or within an AWS ECS cloud environment.
● Cisco Nexus 9000 Series spine and leaf switches for Cisco ACI.
◦ The Cisco ACI fabric is a full-mesh topology of high-speed links (40/100/400G) between redundant spine switches and leaf switches. The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series switches operate as ACI spine switches and the Cisco Nexus 9300 Series Switches as ACI leaf or spine switches. Modular spines provide the scale and capability to incrementally add ACI leafs to the ACI fabric and grow the ACI fabric to the maximum scale.
◦ Cisco ACI licenses are applied per Cisco Nexus 9000 device in a physical on-premises ACI deployment. The per-device ACI licenses are offered as tiered licenses for easy consumption. Add-on licenses are charged per device, based on value-added feature offerings. For details see the Cisco ACI ordering guide.
Recent questions from the 11/1/22 Cisco ACI webinar