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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure: A new era in the data center
The Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) framework lets applications guide networking behavior by providing pre-defined application requirements and descriptions. These requirements, also known as policy profiles, help you automate network provisioning, application services, security policies, tenant subnets, and workload placements, to help ensure you get the most out of your technology investment, quickly.
What does automation do for you? With simplified provisioning of your application network, you can lower IT costs, reduce errors, accelerate deployment, and foster agility.
● Accelerate time to market by gaining an understanding of the ways that Cisco ACI can address your unique use cases, align IT goals with business goals, and simplify operational processes required for success.
● Reduce risks by identifying and addressing your technical and operational readiness to implement effectively a Cisco ACI solution to support your target use cases.
● Protect capital and operational investments by developing a simple transition path from existing environments to architecture based on Cisco ACI.
● Get complex, multivendor issues resolved quickly to help you maintain performance, reliability, and return on investment of your Cisco ACI deployment.
● With the advent of new capabilities in ACI, companies can leverage Cisco Services to expand their ACI footprint and unify/ extend their fabrics to smaller sites which cannot justify an investment in a dedicated fabric through the use of ACI Remote Leaf and ACI Virtual POD technologies.
● Cisco Services can help companies extend their ACI Fabric to Public Clouds like AWS and Google Cloud Platform securely. From an operator’s perspective, all orchestration, maintenance, troubleshooting is still done centrally while using the same consistent policy sets, no matter where the end points reside.
Achieve business outcomes faster with Cisco Services for Cisco ACI
Cisco ACI can deliver significant advantages for your business. To help you quickly gain the benefits of your Cisco ACI solution while also mitigating risk, we offer a comprehensive portfolio of services. These services provide expert guidance to enable you to accomplish your business and technical objectives. We help you:
● Identify and address technical and operational readiness to effectively deploy the Cisco ACI architecture to support your target use cases
● Ready your data center infrastructure for the new classes of applications in today’s dynamic environment, including cloud-based, performance-intensive, and big data applications
● Simplify operations through integration at the infrastructure, systems, and management levels
● Achieve centralized application-based policy automation, programmability, and visibility in your physical and virtual networks from a single point of management
● Prepare to ensure that your processes and operational tools allow you to benefit fully from Cisco ACI
● Support ACI extensions to the public cloud with AWS, enabling you to have a consistent posture across your on-premises and public cloud footprint
● Get issues resolved quickly by our solution experts, who deliver centralized support across the products in your Cisco ACI ecosystem
Our Cisco ACI Services portfolio provides a range of professional, and support services for each stage of your Cisco ACI journey. Customer Experience (CX-formerly Cisco Services) has helped thousands of companies implement ACI in their data centers and assisted in unifying and extending their ACI data center fabrics in multiple availability zones and regions creating an ideal solution for DCI/DR use case for Data Centers. Through the optimal combination of CX offers and our ACI technology, we provide these capabilities while still maintaining the simplicity of a controller-based architecture to deliver on policy implementation, orchestration, troubleshooting, auditing and health monitoring. When engaged early, we can help you better align your business and IT goals as well as offset costs associated with unnecessary unplanned rework and limited operational readiness due to technology complexity.
Get your Cisco ACI solution up and running quickly with our lifecycle of services:
● Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Advise and Implement Service provides expert support to help you design and deploy a transformational data center solution. We help create a complete framework and end-to-end plan for adopting Cisco ACI, including ACI Adoption Assessment and Adoption Strategy Development plans based on agreed customer requirements and constraints:
◦ Advise: We help you during the evaluation phase with detailed analysis and assessments as well as strategy, planning, and design activities. Our experts guide you through the steps necessary to gauge the merits of the Cisco ACI solution for your specific business and technical requirements, and prepare for a successful solution implementation.
◦ Implement: Cisco Services provide the expert assistance needed to implement the solution. Cisco Training and Implementation Services help you develop and implement detailed test plans; formulate implementation plans; and install, configure, and integrate new solutions in your production network. They also help mitigate the risk associated with migration.
● Cisco Business Critical Services for ACI: Cisco Business Critical Services are a comprehensive portfolio of subscription services that simplify complexity, continually optimize IT, reduce operating expenses, and accelerate transformation. As our next generation of optimization services, these services use a cross-architectural framework of baseline deliverables and customizable capabilities aligned to your outcomes, including actionable analytics, automation, compliance, and unrivaled technology expertise that empower you to predict opportunities, preempt risks, and navigate technology transitions. Cisco Business Critical Services enables you to extract the most value from your Cisco ACI solution by providing a unique framework of capabilities that help you accelerate, maintain, and extend the ROI from your technology investment. We provide annual, ongoing support for data center Layers 4 through 7, data center networking, Cisco Nexus® 9000 Series Switches for ACI, and Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) clusters.
● Cisco Solution Support: Experience 21 percent fewer issues1 with this solution-level technical service. You get access to a team of Cisco ACI experts that is your primary point of contact delivering centralized support across your Cisco ACI ecosystem. Whether you have an issue with a Cisco product or one from another vendor—or are just looking for guidance on your new Cisco ACI—simply contact us. We’ll resolve the issue or coordinate any involved product support teams, remaining accountable for your case from first call to resolution. We’ll also look beyond your original issue to identify any additional problems and resolve them, or provide guidance on potential issues before they can disrupt IT or your business. Since speed is paramount when problems arise, we deliver on a 30-minute service level objective and prioritize Cisco Solution Support cases—all to help you get back to business as usual, quickly.
● Cisco Managed Services: Brings Cisco intellectual capital to the platforms, enabling the Cisco ACI fabric to work optimally with the right performance, availability, and security in your data center(s).
● Cisco Training Services: Enables your IT staff with the skills to design, implement, operate, and troubleshoot Cisco ACI technologies. Your teams will gain comprehensive job-ready skills to deploy, operate, and manage scalable, secure, highly available, policy-based data center.
Cisco ACI Services are available in a mixture of fixed-priced and custom Cisco Professional Services as well as 24/7 Cisco Solution Support to solve specific customer challenges. Whichever service you choose, our expert team will help you quickly and safely accelerate implementation of this new technology and gain the full potential of a policy-based infrastructure to maintain business continuity and increase return on investment.
Your data center is a critical strategic asset. Your world demands better integration among infrastructure, systems management, and application layers. An application-centric operational model can help ensure your technology and services align with your business needs and opportunities. Cisco Services can help ensure your success with Cisco ACI, delivering expert support for planning, designing, deploying, and supporting your new infrastructure.
To learn more about how Cisco Services can help you with your new Cisco ACI, visit https://www.cisco.com/go/dcservices and contact your Cisco sales representative or Cisco authorized partner.