Cisco ACI Reviews

Our primary use case is Multi-site architecture. We run three data centers with Cisco ACI Multi-site, so the interconnections of these three sites are made with ACI.

It has reduced our day-to-day operations by at least half.

• Its simplicity
• It can be automated.

The user interface (UI) should be made easier.

I would like to have a multi-cloud environment, but I just read that Cisco ACI Anywhere is about to be released.

At the moment, the stability is very good. A year and a half ago, sometimes things went wrong with it.

We chose Cisco ACI because of its scalability.

Their technical support is as good as their other products.

We were looking for an automated solution and decided to build from scratch with Cisco ACI.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We used Maticmind, which is an Italian system integrator and Cisco partner. They are very good.

We chose ACI because we have worked with Cisco for a long time and felt that there was no reason to change at the time.

It is a great product. We have not encountered any problems so far. Cisco is very good to work with, and I am really happy with this product.

I would advise to go with Cisco ACI.

We use Cisco ACI within our four data centers, and it has been deployed in all four. They are the backbone within our data centers.

We have an old switches and catalysts. This product makes things easier. Once everything is on Fabric, their routes are bounced around within the Fabric, so you don't have to configure new switchboards or parts. It does makes it that much easier.

Its programmability: You can do stuff to policies to make them more flexible, allowing you to connect devices in new ways. 

I would like Cisco to simplify the interaction of the controller. 

I would also like them to simplify the way you configure the Fabric. The process is quite complex. This can be a barrier to entry. For anything, where it should take two or three steps, you have ten steps.

It took quite a bit of time to learn how to use it. The learning curve is very steep.

Since I joined, we have had about two or three outages. Sometimes the controller to the device interaction can be problematic, but otherwise, it has been quite stable.

It is very scalable and easy to add new devices on, which is very good.

It is possible because we have a contract with them, they are always available. Whenever I have had to talk to them, they are very responsive. When issues have happened, there have been about four or five issues, they were able to have them solved within a day or two.

The initial setup was complex since these are brand new data centers. The topology for the network was different in the way it was set up.

Cisco did the integration. They are still adding new things and deploying. They are doing a very good job.

You can push scripts that you are writing now to set up connections in less than five to ten minutes.

We also evaluated IBM.

With the Cisco ACI technology, the programmability enables interaction. The other solutions are not really built for programmability. They don't interact with their databases directly, where Cisco ACI makes this possible. This is one of the many reasons that our organization selected it.

It is a fantastic product, but train up first. In the first six months before you deploy, if you can get your hands on a demo and attend some classes or do some studies, get yourself to a place of being competent before you start.

• Qatar Rail: network and data center infrastructure
• Msheireb Downtown: smart city project including infrastructure for Big Data
• Ministry of Interior: network design based on Qatar Rail's passive infrastructure.

ACI provides network ability to deploy and respond to the needs of applications, both in the data center and in the cloud.

The ACI fabric supports more than 64,000 dedicated tenant networks. A single fabric can support more than one million IPv4/IPv6 endpoints, more than 64,000 tenants, and more than 200,000 10G ports. 

The ACI fabric enables any service (physical or virtual) anywhere with no need for additional software or hardware gateways to connect between the physical and virtual services and normalizes encapsulations for virtual extensible local area network (VXLAN)/VLAN/network virtualization using generic routing encapsulation (NVGRE).

• Security and isolation based on the type of traffic

• High level of resiliency.

It's fully-integrated into vCenter, so we can see everything, like vMotion, and can manage fully with vCenter, as well as manage the whole network.

• It's essential for a software defined network.
• Automated systems
• Helps to defend policies that we've created
• Good for automation

It's very new, so there's lots of bugs, and it's only good for testing with PoC customers. We're the first Canadian customers for this product.

Infrastructure and logic should have a better connection. There's too much linkage and it's easy for people to get lost.

No issues with deployment.

Again, it has lots of bugs as we're the first Canadian company for which it's been used.

The scalability is very good, as the controller automatically detects new additions and scales itself. It's agile because it's a cloud-based network.

We've used it a lot, and someone is always available because our employer is the first customer in Canada.

It's complex, and you must go through training.

Look to similar products depending on your budget. Remember, this is in the early stages, so it's still evolving. Be sure to get training for implementation and deployment.