Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)

In a customer-driven digital marketplace, your IT infrastructure has to intelligently support various applications. Applications today execute differently, are highly virtualized, and are more distributed than ever. Continuous application delivery is the norm.

As your customers transition to public cloud and hybrid IT environments, they still want to retain the same level of control and consistent policies across their application infrastructure. Their application developers need fast access to infrastructure resources. Applications need to churn a high volume of data at light speed. To meet these demands you need agile, scalable and highly available datacenters offering secured operations, and ease of management, provisioning, and consumption.

Requirements of the Modern Network

Traditional IT infrastructure was never designed to meet these requirements. One of the biggest challenges with traditional IT infrastructure is to scale services without compromising reliability and high availability. To remain competitive, your infrastructure requires application-centric, SDN (software-defined networking) capabilities.

SDN automates and optimizes IT resource requirements, simplifies provisioning, and reduces cost. As the application development environment becomes more agile and dynamic, intent-based infrastructure provides operationally efficient network, simplifies the management environment, and accelerates time to market.

What is Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)?

Compared to software-only SDN solutions, ACI offers more comprehensive on-demand, self-serve capabilities. ACI enforces intent in the form of policy across the network and as such provides the foundation for intent-based networking. ACI automates network and security for workloads within and across heterogeneous domains; i.e., physical (bare-metal) servers, virtual machines, containers, or public cloud.

What makes ACI unique is its architecture. ACI is built on a leaf-and-spine network architecture, which can support any workload at any part of the data center.

Benefits of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)

Designed to provide an application-centric environment, ACI can respond to the dynamic demands of today’s data centers. ACI supports physical, virtual and container environments simultaneously without compromising scalability or security. ACI management is software-based. Thus, when there is a need to expand or reconfigure, devices are not affected.

ACI architecture provides faster backups when compared to software-only SDN, and can handle traffic with much faster throughput and lower latency. Its unique architecture supports mission-critical applications by providing high availability with minimal to no outages, better automation, and improved security through micro-segmentation across and between data centers.

Benefits of Cisco ACI

Cisco ACI delivers highly secure, open, and comprehensive SDN solutions for data centers. By supporting a hybrid IT infrastructure, Cisco ACI greatly simplifies, optimizes, and accelerates infrastructure deployment and governance, and expedites the application deployment lifecycle. With Cisco ACI you can leverage several benefits of advanced and automated infrastructure services.

Efficient Network Operations

Tasks become easier, less effort, fewer issues, faster response
Central control, automation enabled, self-checking changes, simple to use
Reduced provisioning time, reduced operational effort

Enhanced Security

Whitelist policy driving a zero-trust architecture
Improved multi-tenant security with micro-segmentation
Security across the Cloud
Industry compliance with certification for Federal Government, Retail, Finance, and Healthcare.

Increased Flexibility, Scaling

Integrated virtual/physical network with a single-pane-of-glass management
Hypervisor independent solution supporting any workload type: physical bare-metal servers, virtual machines and/or containers.
Reduced operational effort through automation delivering a highly scalable network

Improved and Measurable ROI

Elastic scale and growth through open APIs providing seamless integration with 3rd party vendor solutions.

Cross Geographical Support

Improved disaster recovery, improved geographical support

Simplified Cloud Integration

Integration with cloud service providers

Acadia’s industry-leading Cisco ACI services enable leading financial institutions, law firms, retailers and manufacturing companies to free up vital resources, reduce IT costs, and become more operationally efficient.

Key Features