SAN FRANCISCO – Cisco launched its Application Centric Infrastructure this week, prompting a whirlwind of competitor announcements and keeping industry watchers perched on the edges of their seats. Does the platform, built on Cisco subsidiary Insieme’s architecture, live up to all the anticipation and revolutionize SDN? Well, the ACI strategy has strengths and weaknesses. Let’s start with an overview of ACI and its strengths.
The opening pitch for Cisco ACI starts with two key points. First, the statistics show only 21 percent of data center workloads are virtualized today and 42 percent of those customers have multiple hypervisor vendors. Because of this, Cisco maintains that hypervisor-based overlay networking does not address the real requirements that customers have. The second point is that networking has not yet lived up to its service potential to the business, and network value must be improved upon. Enter Cisco ACI as an open approach for software-defined networking (SDN).
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