While at CiscoLive in Barcelona in January, I heard quite a bit about ACI adoption customer stories and new features. There were multiple ACI sessions and hands-on opportunities at the conference and we should expect even more at Cisco Live! San Diego in June.
A little background on ACI first. Cisco ACI is the industry-leading Software Defined Network (SDN) solution that combines physical and virtual elements with the goal of simplifying network operations and management while delivering application-focused network services. Stated simply Cisco ACI facilitates application agility and data center automation. It also provides more of a programmable network for automation and to help simplify the task of management.
With ACI, customers are automating common network tasks to simplify their work while also enabling them to evolve toward application-based, policy-driven network services. ACI provides centralized visibility and control so that administrators can manage and troubleshoot network services across their environment. Cisco asserts that ACI architecture presents fewer failure vectors than software-only SDN solutions, enabling ACI to fail less often and recover faster from common network failures (i.e., link or network node failures).
Now on to my observations at Cisco Live about how ACI shows real customer momentum and a strong commitment to the ACI technology:
- Over 6,000 production customers since the ACI launch in late 2013! This is truly amazing and demonstrates broad adoption globally of a solution acquired from Insieme.
- Cisco provides dozens of marquee ACI customer case studies which can be found here and definitely worth a visit if your organization is considering ACI or even if you have deployed the solution. I enjoyed learning about how customers are adopting new technologies to increase productivity and the services they offer to the business.
- ACI support for Amazon and Azure. ACI started as an on-premises SDN that worked with select Cisco Nexus hardware. This means that ACI has gone from a Cisco-only solution for Nexus to being hardware-agnostic and now also being cloud-agnostic. So expect to see even more customers announced at the 2020 Cisco Live conferences. This capability really shows Cisco’s engineering commitment to ACI.
As a reminder, Statseeker provides unparalleled visibility of SDN infrastructure, specifically for Cisco ACI. With a single Statseeker instance, Network Operations engineers maintain visibility on both their legacy infrastructure and SDN, simultaneously. Statseeker’s new SDN Monitoring for Cisco ACI enables network engineers to leverage Statseeker’s functional advantages including real-time high-resolution polling, unlimited retention of historical data and advanced analytics to provide unparalleled visibility into the ACI infrastructure. Feel free to learn more about the solution here.