The Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI, is taking data centers to the next step in automation. The ACI is Cisco’s data center software-defined networking (SDN) architecture. SDN enables the network to be centrally managed and automatically adjusts configuration to meet application needs. The Cisco ACI disassociates the control plane from the data (physical) plane. No more configurations are changed across an endless number of devices. As a result, the ACI architecture automates IT tasks, enhances business agility, and accelerates the data center.

Applications today behave differently than they did in the past. They are highly virtualized, run on multiple hypervisors, and are more distributed than ever. They also are developed differently. These newer applications require rapid and continuous delivery, shifting the communication needs within the data center. This new model is a transformation in data center design and scale, IT infrastructure management, provisioning, and consumption. Ease of provisioning and speed are now critical performance metrics for a data center network infrastructure that supports physical, virtual, and cloud environments without compromising scalability or security.

The Cisco ACI uses the concept of endpoints and policies. The endpoints are virtual machines (VMs) or physical servers. In network architecture designs, several endpoints have the same requirements, so they can be grouped together under endpoint groups. Then policies can be defined to determine with whom endpoint groups can communicate; for instance, a group of web servers may need to communicate with a group of application servers. The policy also defines other key parameters, such as which endpoint groups can access each other (or not), as well as quality of service (QoS) parameters and other services. Cisco ACI benefits include the following:

Centralized policy-defined automation management

Holistic application-based solution that delivers flexibility and automation for agile IT

Automatic fabric deployment and configuration with a single point of management

Automation of repetitive tasks, reducing configuration errors

Real-time visibility and application health score

Centralized real-time health monitoring of physical and virtual networks

Instant visibility into application performance combined with intelligent placement decisions

Faster troubleshooting for day-2 operation

Open and comprehensive end-to-end security

 Open APIs, open standards, and open-source elements that enable software flexibility for DevOps teams, and firewall and application delivery controller (ADC) ecosystem partner integration

 Automatic capture of all configuration changes integrated with existing audit and compliance tracking solutions