Cisco Delivers on ACI Vision: Adds ACI Migration Path for Traditional Cisco Data Centers and UCS Director Support Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure gains customer momentum, extends policy model to existing infrastructure, adds platform support and introduces ACI-ready integrated infrastructure Cisco Nexus 9K-X9736PQ Linecard for Cisco Nexus 9500 platform
Cisco Nexus 9336PQ Switch
Cisco Nexus 9396TX Switch
SAN JOSE, Calif.-May 16, 2014- Cisco today announced it is delivering on its vision for Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) through the release this summer of the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), ACI fabric mode for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches, UCS Director support for ACI, industry-leading hardware and software innovations across its portfolio, and a market strategy that includes a robust ecosystem, Cisco validated designs, and new Cisco Services for ACI. In addition, Cisco is extending ACI support across its existing Nexus portfolio to enable customers with existing Cisco Nexus-based data centers to deploy ACI, while keeping intact their existing investments in network infrastructure across physical and virtual workloads. The Nexus 7000 Series switches and ASR 9000 Router will also be integrated into the ACI fabric as a Data Center Interconnect (DCI) gateway/router. In addition, integrated infrastructure solutions FlexPod and Vblock Systems are embedding Cisco ACI to accelerate application delivery and streamline operations.
Selected to represent a range of company sizes, industries, and workloads, over 70 customers and partners have been actively trialing ACI, with enthusiastic results. Cisco Nexus 9000 switches and the Cisco ACI solution now include over 1000 customers in the sales pipeline. For those attending Cisco Live, Ciscos annual IT and communications conference, in San Francisco this year, there will be a data center technology keynote on Wednesday May 21 featuring a panel of customers to talk about their experiences with ACI.
Customers Comment on ACI
Symantec is an early adopter of Ciscos Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), leveraging the technology within our own Agile Data Center, said Jon Sanchez, director of Data Center Services, Symantec. Cisco ACI brings the scalability and efficiency we need while enabling us to truly bring next generation networking capabilities to our customers.
Ranked among the top 100 most-visited websites in the world, UOL is the leading Internet services company in Brazil since 1996, providing content and an extensive Web services and products portfolio. UOLDIVEO, a full IT outsourcing company within the same group, is Brazils largest IT data and infrastructure provider, targeting the enterprise market with a broad range of infrastructure and services products, including its cloud computing initiative, UOL Cloud: which aims to be the most flexible and complete platform in Brazil. The growing customer demand for immediate, reliable, secure, scalable, robust, and high-performance infrastructures drives us to search for the worlds best-of-breed technologies to build a state-of-the-art cloud computing system that gives our customers all the power and flexibility they need, said Eduardo Maldonado Rosa, CTO, UOLDIVEO. We fulfill all of our clients necessities, and network connectivity is one of their top priorities. UOL Cloud is collaborating with Cisco to deploy the ACI solution in all our UOL Cloud data centers as the best solution to deliver data center network architecture, automation, operations, reliability and the flexibility requirements that we face in a daily basis.
Extending ACI Support to Traditional Cisco Networks
Investment protection is a hallmark of Ciscos technology strategy, and a major contributor to creating Cisco customer loyalty. Cisco continues that commitment by enabling interoperability and a migration path for customers to deploy ACI in their existing data centers based on Cisco Nexus 2000, 3000, 5000, 6000 and7000 network switches and ASR 9000 routers. In addition, ACI ecosystem members such as F5 and Citrix with Layer 4-7 services can be deployed in either existing Nexus fabrics or the ACI mode without a hardware upgrade. Investment protection options include:
The Cisco Application Policy Model can be extended to both physical and virtual workloads in existing Nexus infrastructure through the Cisco Application-centric Virtual Switch (AVS), an APIC-enabled Nexus 1000V virtual switch, or by deploying Nexus 9000 switches as a remote leaf within customers existing data centers.
The Nexus 7000 Series switches and ASR 9000 Router will also be integrated into the ACI fabric as a Data Center Interconnect (DCI) gateway/router, taking advantage of Nexus LISP and OTV features enabling an end-to-end consistent policy management framework available centrally through the APIC for both physical and virtual workloads.
UCS Director 5.0: Support for ACI
Cisco UCS Director is designed to automate every step necessary to provision the network, compute, and storage resources, both physical and virtual, that are required to support an application. This greatly reduces the time needed to deploy infrastructure, resulting in IT agility, faster response time to business requirements, and lower operational costs. Version 5.0 of UCS Director now supports ACI and Nexus 9000 Series switches, in addition to a wide range of compute and storage vendors products, and Ciscos traditional data center product portfolio. With a single point of management, both physical and virtual resources can be provisioned within minutes, and the deployment process is consistent and reliable across all infrastructure.
UCS Director provides an extensible platform with a software developer kit and an open Application Programming Interface (API), allowing third-party vendors to establish a connector that will snap the
