Application Centric Infrastructure(ACI), As we humans build relationships to communicate and share their knowledge, computer networks are built to allow for nodes to exchange data at ever-increasing speeds and rates. Cisco has introduced Application Centric Infrastructure(ACI), as a holistic systems-based approach to infrastructure management. The operators for these rapidly growing networks are the applications, the building blocks that consume and provide the data which are close to the heart of the business lifecycle. It is purpose-built for integrating cloud computing and data center management, as an alternative to software-defined networking.
The design of ACI is to provide the following:
- Application-driven policy modeling.
- Integrated policy management and visibility of infrastructure and application health.
- Automated infrastructure configuration management.
- Integrated physical and virtual infrastructure management.
- Seamless communications from any endpoint to any endpoint.
Cisco’s ACI is an architecture that enables the full lifecycle management of application deployment and addresses shortcomings of software-defined networking (SDN). It integrates cloud computing and data center management and is a policy-based automation solution. It also changes the way networking is viewed in that it moves enterprises from the traditional IT model to this new policy-based approach to create faster deployments and greater agility.
The main benefits of ACI are the following:
- Ease (and speed) of deployment.
- Simplicity of automation.
- Multitenancy (network slicing).
- Capability to create portable configuration templates.
- Hardware-based security.
- Elimination of flooding from the fabric.
- Intuitive and easy configuration process.
Conclusion
Abundant new ideas, concepts, and terms come with this pairing of ACI and Promise Theory. This grants management teams to create an abstract “end-state” model and the system to automate the configuration in compliance. It addresses not only fulfill the need for network virtualization but also hardware abstraction to create a stateless network in the entire data center. This network will make it easier for network administrators to communicate better with application administrators, and also create powerful networks that offer great performance in less time than traditional networks on account of things like automation and repeatable processes.
BayInfotech, follows a model-driven approach to configuration management. The model-based configuration is distributed through the managed nodes. While SDN significantly increases the speed of network change, ACI takes application deployment to the next level.