Cisco ACI Reviews

This solution is used in our data center.

This solution is faster than what we had previously.

The most valuable feature is the data center communication.

I would like to see more troubleshooting apps.

There should be more and better SNMP monitoring.

The stability of this solution is pretty good.

In terms of scalability, this solution is pretty good.

I was not involved in the process of selecting this solution. Rather, I performed the setup.

The initial setup of this solution is semi-difficult. There is a learning curve.

My advice to anybody implementing this solution is to jump in with both feet!

This biggest thing that I learned when using this solution is T-Panel.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is centralization.

This solution has improved the way we operate because it is a time-saver.

This solution allows you to do everything quicker and more efficiently.

The CLI needs to be improved.

This product is pretty stable. 

The scalability is really good.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

Our setup is still in progress.

We used an integrator to assist us.

This is a solution that I would recommend.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use case for Cisco ACI is for managing our data center and network switches. We will use it for the whole data center environment eventually.

We are still growing it in our main data center. We haven't even expanded it to our recovery data center yet. As far as managing a static environment, so far, it's been great. When it comes to adding in new changes and new things, that's where we're going to have some challenges. Cisco ACI is difficult both technically to build it out and then operationally to manage.

It's improved the static configuration of our data center switching environment. But it's added some challenges to our ability to operationalize it and make it easier for people to manage. 

The good side of it is being able to control your network switching and routing in the data center from a single control point.

I don't have any new features that I need in Cisco ACI yet because we're still learning and making it work in our environment today. I don't have anything new. 

The one big challenge with it is Cisco going from a perpetual license model to a licensing model that is renewed every year. You pay a large fee to use stuff like this. That to me is one of our challenges.

Making training more available for all of our employees and not even at a cost would help. If you want this to be deployed to all the data centers everywhere it's got to be something that everyone can sit down and get training on. 

If you're going to try and operationalize it amongst existing staff members and even up-coming ones, it's not a simple thing to sit down and learn. 

I've been doing this for thirty-five years now. It's one of the most difficult things I've had to sit down and learn myself.

With the stability so far we've had very few issues with Cisco ACI. A couple of routing problems that were glitches within ACI. Other than that, the environment is stable and we like it.

Scalability is great in a Cisco ACI environment. But when you're migrating from an old data center into ACI, there are some challenges. 

In all the people that manage it, most are just trying to throw entire networks with multiple environments on them into ACI. It's good but it also has a lot of challenges for us.

Technical support is good but limited because Cisco ACI is so new. There's a lack of expertise on the support side. You need to get the right engineer on the call when you're having a problem.

The initial setup of the Cisco ACI is straightforward but also complex. Once you have designed how you're going to deploy it, i.e. your naming conventions and how you're going to configure things, it is standardized. 

That part of it is standard and easy to deploy. It's coming to that point where you've got the complexity of your naming conventions and all those things stood up properly that is hard.

It's only this engineer that we hired with a great mind who could make it work for us.

We relied on an engineer who we hired on a contract side but was well versed in a lot of things. He had not done an ACI in deployment. Between him and our dedicated Cisco support engineers, we were able to stand it up without too many issues.

The number one reason we chose it was that eventually, we will doing some sort of SD (Software Defined) access. When a user gets on the network and they connect, they'll have a persona. We'll know who they are. We'll know what to allow them into. A lot of that'll be controlled through ACI on the data center side.

We didn't have SD access. We're still going in that direction. It's going to be a while.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this product in the five to six range. It is a good product. It will be solid as it matures. It's technically challenging for anyone.

One guy has stood up most of our environment. We are trying to use him to train all the rest of our staff. But it's a slow process. 

Understanding how to get in under the hood and make ACI work is not a simple task unless you're in and out of it regularly. Even the gentleman who installed it and works on it most of the time has to go back and play with it on his own before he makes changes. 

Just to remember how things are done is difficult because it's got a lot of uniqueness to it in the way things are deployed.

Anyone using Cisco ACI should know what their direction is. How much money do they have to spend? Then I could sit down with them and tell them whether ACI would the best solution or not for what they are doing. 

I don't think ACI is for everyone. It's for larger data centers that are going down this path of SD access. I am sure there are competitors out there now. We're just not looking into them because we already have ACI deployed. That where we're at now.

We use this solution for our data center infrastructure. We are a small, private university, supporting a mix of cloud and on-premise applications.

This solution saves us time. The integration with vCenter means that when I create something on the network, it only has to happen one time instead of many times for our many virtual hosts.

The most valuable feature is the integration with vCenter, as it makes it easier for the systems and network to interoperate.

I would like to see simpler contract building, engineering, and architecture.

There should be an alternative "ACI Light" solution for smaller-sized enterprises.

This solution has been very solid. We've had no problems in the three years that we have been using it.

We haven't really grown or changed the network since this solution was installed, so I cannot comment on scalability.

Technical support for this solution is great. The ACI guys have been some of the best technical support people that I've worked with at Cisco. They just seem to know things better than the other groups within their support infrastructure. 

The initial setup of this solution is complex. Our environment is not very complex, but the product itself is very complex. It takes a lot of steps to configure.

We used a partner that Cisco recommended to assist us with the implementation. 

We were one of the first implementations, and I think we were used at the lab during our installation. Some of the things that you learn over time were not known, so it could have been done better.

We have seen partial ROI. However, that is probably more our fault than the product's fault because we haven't leveraged the tools that are there.

Three years ago when we were starting with this process, the industry said that software defined networking was the way we had to go. At the time, this is the only solution that was available.

I was one of the proponents of this solution.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to really look at the size of your organization. Ours is kind of in the middle in terms of size, between large and small. So, ACI may be a little bit of overkill for the size of the shop that we have. If you have a large organization then it's a good product. If, on the other hand, you are a little shop, it is probably more than you need.

This is a good solution, but no product is perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for the Cisco ACI solution is the data center.

This product has improved our organization through automation.

The most valuable feature is the unified fabric.

I recommend to customers that they meet a knowledgeable vendor to help them with it.

Cisco ACI customer service is very good.

Cisco ACI was sold to us. Everybody is using it now.

With the initial setup of Cisco ACI, it is new, so you need to make sure issues pop up. You have to work through those issues. I would like to see included how-to videos.

We went with a consultant, i.e. a third party vendor: HCL. They're very good.

Arista was one of the main alternatives that we evaluated.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate this product at an eight based on everybody else's experiences. It's pretty good. I don't have a full review.

More how-to videos and instructional information is required. We need to simplify it.

We implement customized Cisco ACI for our clients as a networking solution for a variety of purposes.

My organization specifically implements Cisco ACI for other companies, so the product is basically our business model.

For clients, a visible GUI dashboard provides a unified view of the network. In order to do that before, clients may have had to implement multiple tools depending on the structure of the network. Now they can implement one tool and have a unified visual picture of the health of the network.

In a very general way, the ease of access, ease of use, and ease of connecting the system is a valuable feature in itself. The solution doesn't really increase detection rates as that is not what it was created for. Threat prevention comes from other devices that might be connected to the Cisco ACI that monitors external traffic. The ACI solution maintains what end-of-life products would be doing and offers other opportunities to unify solutions.

There has not been a single implementation we have done where the client wants to use all the features that are in the product currently. Contemplating new features seems out of order. Every product can benefit from new features as long as they are desired and add functionality that is useful. Most of the features that are there now are good and Cisco is doing a really good job at staying ahead of the curve with their competition. They are implementing new features before companies are even ready to use them or know that there might be a need for them.

Figuring out how to implement the product for clients is the area we struggle with the most every day. Perhaps an enhancement would be artificially intelligent solutions, but that would be further down the road.

The product itself is very stable. As long as it is deployed with care and solid core objects it will remain stable.

The solution is extremely scalable in ways that pure hardware solutions were incapable of.

I think the customer service is really good. I call Cisco any time and I can usually get someone to help me with whatever I need at whatever time I call.

A portion of Cisco's equipment is going end-of-life. Most of the companies that we implement for are using Cisco Nexus 7K, 5K, 2K so they have 752 implementations and some of their 7K's are going end-of-life. The newer equipment that's becoming available is cheaper. Sometimes Cisco will essentially give it away.

Initial setup can be straightforward or complex depending on who you're implementing the solution for and what they want to do with it. If the client's network is extremely complex, they have a lot of different things that can bring information into and out of their network. Implementation can become significantly more complex as there is more to consider. If the client's network is really simple, then the deployment is straightforward.

We do sometimes experience some issues with integration and in trying to satisfy some of the things that the client wants to do. There are some hidden issues that don't surface until you implement the solution in the network. Some of the issues are client-facing where the client causes the issues. In other words, the issues are not necessarily a problem with the system.

You still have to spend time to try to go through everything and make it work optimally. When you are implementing new features, there's almost always a learning curve if the features are not performing with objects that have already been built.

We are the integrator and reseller, so the implementation is always excellent and the expertise is superior.

I think it has a fairly good time to value. While it takes time to implement, once it's implemented the ability to make changes and adopt new functionality to the system becomes very easy. That saves more money over time because changes are implemented using fewer internal resources.

I've seen some ROI for clients. Clients don't normally share that information with me, but I see how clients have benefited from implemented ACI and how the speed of implementing changes on their network improves over time. The ability to quickly make changes in the network is the biggest benefit that I've seen.

We don't license the products ourselves. The clients that we implement for also license it with Cisco.

As it stands right now, the licensing structure hasn't been fully fleshed out for ACI. So, if Cisco hasn't fully fleshed it out, I'm not sure what the cost is going to be yet.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of ten. It is a great product, but there are issues with it. It's not perfect and it would have to be to get a ten. The issues that are there are easily mitigated but that also requires effort.

The analytics are pretty good. The built-in dashboard essentially provides analytics out of the box. There are other plug-ins that you can use to make the solution work better for you as a company. You have the option of developing other tools and utilities to use with it because it's an API.

When you are first building the system, it takes longer because you have to build all the objects that you expect to reuse. But because you're building reusable objects it makes adding other functionality easier because of the simple fact that you've already built those reusable objects. When you're doing new things it gets easier.

I think one thing that most people do is avoid reading manuals for anything. Read, read, read and consider doing research. Not all the information you find will be good, but you will discover things you don't know.

Our primary use case for Cisco ACI in our company is to have a central point to manage our network and to do API automation. Those are the two main focuses to automate.

Currently, we're still doing a POC on Cisco ACI. We haven't made the transition. It's a huge jump from what we currently have in our network to the ACI. We're still evaluating it. 

We've already purchased the gear, but we still need more training. We already purchased all the hardware for the production environment. 

We want to keep on training before we make the migration phase.

The most valuable feature of the solution is having a central point to log in. I have a simple dashboard that has all my devices connected. That is what I'm looking for.

For stability, it seems fine. I have no complaints about that.

It's easy to keep adding. You have a set where you just add another leaf to your ACI fabric. 

I can scale quite easily. Just add another leaf to my ACI fabric. It seems straightforward.

I've not used the technical support. I've been working with our Cisco reps and a few professional service providers. They are amazing, number one. 

Their main office is walking distance from my company's office. I can just walk over and complain. It's good having face-to-face relationships.

We are a Cisco shop. Right now, SDN is a buzzword. The next evolution for our company is to have an SDN network. Since we're a Cisco shop, it's ACI.

We've been a Cisco shop since day one.

The initial setup is not straightforward at all. Cisco just released a document that tells you how to set it up, but before that, it was overwhelming. 

To set up, Cisco ACI takes months. There are so many features and you're too scared. They did release a pdf that shows you a step through, i.e. how to set up your ACI fabric. Before that, there's just bare-bones information for something so expensive. It was kind of funny. They just released it.

My complaint about this is: We purchased the ACI gear, but to do monitoring, to do stats, to do telemetry statistics, etc. we have to purchase another product from Cisco. 

I would ask from Cisco when we purchase the hardware if some of these features could be built in the purchase. Now I'm dissatisfied that I have to purchase this to do basic monitoring. It should all be built in.

We did not evaluate other options because we'd have to reevaluate what we currently use for Cisco. None of our staff is trained for anything but Cisco. Cisco was the only product we looked at.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco ACI with a nine. Some of the features should be built in. If you think you know ACI, you don't. Get more training.

Our primary use for Cisco ACI is to separate networks that don't want to talk to each other except for set work.

We are setting up a whole dev environment. Some of us are purchasing separate hardware. We can optimize our existing hardware by realizing ACI.

Cisco ACI can separate networks with a buoy interface. That is the most valuable feature.

I wish that if I had to open up an additional tab, I wouldn't have to log in every single time. That would be a feature I would like.

For the licensing model of the system, I still have not gotten another update after eight months. It's telling me I'm not licensed even though I'm told I am by my reseller.

The stability of the solution looks good. The only roadblock is that it is a big change to Cisco networking.

The scalability of the solution I cannot rate at this time since I just started.

I haven't had to work with Cisco's tech support too much yet. I've been using professional services.

The setup was in the middle. It was straightforward as to what we were doing. Since ACI is a new technology, we had to make sure we didn't start too far apart. I didn't want to break anything. That made it complex.

We used two integrator reseller consultants for the deployment: SHI and BTA. Our experience with them so far is good. Next time, I would want to work with all of the professional services more together.

I wanted an easier way to manage segmentation. Cisco offered this and this is also what the resellers were showing me as well. That this was going to be the future of the system. 

Cisco was the main vendor that I chose. We were also looking at Juniper and HP, but they did not have a similar situation. It was kind of a no-brainer.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco ACI at eight.

If you purchase Cisco ACI, make sure you understand exactly how you're going to put it in because it's not going to be easy to work with.