The emergence of SDN promised a new era of centrally managed, software-based automation tools that c

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Countries and Regions Asia Pacific Belgium Dutch French Canada English French France Réseaux Data Center Green IT IPv6 Collaboration Sécurité Smart Cities Germany Italy Italia PartnerIT IT motor reg departments and lines of business are looking at cloud automation tools and software-defined networking (SDN) architectures to accelerate application delivery, reduce operating motor reg costs, and increase business agility. motor reg The success of an IT or cloud automation motor reg solution depends largely on the business policies that can be carried out by the infrastructure through the SDN architecture.
Through a detailed comparison of critical architectural components, this blog series motor reg shows how the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) architecture supports a more business-relevant application policy language, greater scalability through a distributed enforcement system rather than centralized control, and greater network visibility than alternative software overlay motor reg solutions or traditional SDN designs. motor reg
Historically, IT departments have sought out greater automation as device proliferation has accelerated to overcome the challenges of applying manual processes motor reg for critical tasks. About 20 years ago the automation of desktop and PC management was an imperative, and about 10 years ago server automation became important motor reg as applications motor reg migrated to larger numbers of modular x86 and RISC-based systems. Today, with the consolidation of data centers, IT must address not only application and data proliferation, but also the emergence of large scale application motor reg virtualization and cloud deployments, requiring IT to focus on cloud and network automation.
The emergence of SDN promised a new era of centrally managed, software-based automation tools that could accelerate network management, optimization, and remediation. Gartner has defined SDN as a new approach to designing, building and operating networks motor reg that focuses on delivering business motor reg agility while lowering capital and operational costs. motor reg ( Source: Ending the Confusion About Software-Defined Networking: A Taxonomy , Gartner, March 2013)
Furthermore, Gartner, in an early 2014 report ( Mainstream Organizations Should Prepare for SDN Now , Gartner, March 2014), notes that SDN is a radical motor reg new way of networking and requires senior infrastructure leaders to rethink traditional networking practices and paradigms. In this same report, Gartner makes an initial comparison of mainstream SDN solutions that are emerging, including VMware NSX, and Cisco ACI. There has been some discussion whether Cisco ACI is an SDN solution or something motor reg more, but most agree that, in a broad sense, the IT automation objectives of SDN and Cisco ACI are basically the same, and some of the baseline architectural features, including a central policy controller, motor reg programmable devices, and use of overlay networks, lead to a useful comparison.
This blog series focuses on the way that Cisco ACI expands traditional SDN methodology with a new application-centric policy model. It specifically compares critical protocols and components in Cisco ACI with VMware NSX to show the advantages of Cisco ACI over software overlay networks and the advantages of the ACI application policy model over what has been offered by prior SDN solutions. It also discusses what the Cisco solution means for customers, the industry, and the larger SDN community.
Businesses and IT want to deploy, scale, motor reg and optimize applications on demand, in minutes, not weeks, to increase business agility and lower operating costs. SDN and related solutions propose to accomplish this through programmatic extensions to the network, so that IT and business policies can for the first time be implemented in software, and the software can automate network administration tasks, reducing motor reg the need for manual operations. Programmatic automation of network administration motor reg also appeared motor reg initially to be the only way to achieve cloud-level scale, supporting tens of thousands of servers and millions of workloads while migrating them on-demand to optimize resource utilization.
Although traditional SDN overlay technology and the more recent Cisco ACI have important differences, both address fundamental architectural motor reg requirements for policy-based IT infrastructure automation: Centralized policy motor reg store and infrastructure controller: In SDN and Cisco ACI, this feature is generally known as the controller (Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller [APIC] for Cis