ACI is an important step
forward in unifying physical and virtual resources and improving application experiences
Among the most important
requirements in delivering superior application experiences as the industry
transitions to an increasingly virtualized environment is accomplishing tighter
integration between applications themselves and the underlying physical and
virtual resources working together to support them. The ability of companies to
meet users’ expectations and the needs of increasingly diverse and demanding
applications depends on achieving this goal.
Cisco has taken a strong step
forward toward achieving the goal with the introduction of its Application
Centric Infrastructure (ACI) framework, the related Nexus 9000 family of switches,
and perhaps most important, its Application Policy Infrastructure Controller
(APIC).
The Nexus 9000 family of data
center switches is designed to achieve efficiency, agility, and scale to
support both virtualized and legacy applications. It is tuned to enforcing
diverse application policies dynamically and charts out a practical path for
supporting both types of applications. As such, it is an attractive “underlay” networking
platform for the emerging environment.
In parallel, to address the needs
of integrating policies across the broader range of data center resources that
need orchestration, Cisco has moved toward elastic and extensible policy
management platforms for cloud and data center infrastructures with its APIC policy
management system. APIC combines a compelling mix of prepackaged functionality
with the modularity and openness needed to participate in a variety of data
center environments. It provides 1) a solution that blends policies that
applications require in whole data center implementations; 2) support for combining
physical computing infrastructures (such as UCS) into the same application
policy framework integration of physical and virtual overlay networks (in the Nexus
product series, for example); 3) via ecosystem partners’ integration of platforms
with APICs functionality, the policies can be applied to physical and virtualized
storage management systems (NetApp and EMC), hypervisors/virtual machines
(VMware, Microsoft, Citrix); L4-7 network service engines (Symantec, F5,
Citrix), additional service orchestration platforms (OpenStack, IBM, Microsoft,
VMware), and application platforms (such as SAP).
APIC is also open via APIs for
extension in northbound and southbound directions, acknowledging the need for
the openness so crucial to support heterogeneous data center environments. Cisco
has also highlighted APIC as the initial entry in its family of software
control platforms needed across data center, WAN, and access network areas in
the Cisco ONE (Open Network Environment) framework, further underscoring its
relevance in helping achieve holistic policy management for applications in an
extended network infrastructure.
With all these positives, will
APIC be the one or the only policy and service management
software system customers need to achieve superior application services moving
forward? Probably not. Although APIC is indeed a strong step forward and
supports an extensive range of service management features, it’s realistic to
envision a mix of service management tools covering the full range of
components. However, by presenting a unified base for linking the network environment
with multiple other components likely to be mixed together uniquely in each
customer’s environment, the APIC platform presents a well-designed, modular
option that solves the physical and virtual network coordination problem and is
also available to help solve parts of the application services management
problem in the data center.
There will certainly be additional application management tools and systems for managing virtual computing, storage and services that come from other sources and may work together with Cisco’s ACI to achieve an improved application delivery design. In this way Cisco is demonstrating that overlay and underlay resources can be orchestrated automatically to support diverse application requirements and that a modular policy management fabric is within reach for many customers’ environments.
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