Technology
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is Cisco’s software-defined networking (SDN) offering for data center and cloud networks. ACI allows application requirements to define the network, thus simplifying, optimizing, and accelerating the entire application deployment life cycle. ACI delivers software flexibility with the scalability of hardware performance and facilitates rapid systems integration and customization for network services, with visibility of both physical and virtual networks.
ACI is built for multi-tenancy, ensuring proper isolation and detailed telemetry for SLAs across different consumers of the infrastructure while also providing a consistent security policy across both physical and virtual applications. ACI empowers IT teams to offer cloud-based services to their customers directly with the associated SLAs and performance requirements for the most demanding business applications. It’s an open programmable architecture with a comprehensive set of APIs that will be exposed to the open source community enabling the broadest choice in Data Centre management and infrastructure. Finally, ACI enables comprehensive investment protection by leveraging existing IT teams’ skillset and infrastructure providing lower overall TCO.
Challenge
With their network hardware facing EOL (End of Life), our customer needed to upgrade their networking technology into a newer, future proof solution that supported their data center migrations, and provided the capability for stretched VLANs that were required for VM migration & storage strategies defined within the business.
The EOL hardware had to be removed from the final solution, which meant a solution needed to be found that could facilitate the needed logical network migration as well. Both data centers had to be shut down once the new solution was deployed.
Solution
Metsi consulted with the customer to understand their current requirements as well as their networking roadmap. Metsi proposed Cisco ACI in order to complement their new VM infrastructure & storage solution. A multipod ACI fabric deployment was selected, providing a single management domain for their software defined data center (SDDC), including FlashStack. Once the required services were migrated into the solution, the final stage of migrating the network gateways from the EOL hardware into the ACI fabric was completed. Any EOL hardware was then removed with no impact to services.
Summary
Metsi provides software-defined (SDN) consulting, design, and delivery services, with ongoing break/fix or advisory support. Metsi’s ACI practice is very mature in its ability to not only leverage and implement the ACI technology, but also on how to advise and consult customers in their journey to ACI. Metsi offers a phased approach to ACI implementations, with multiple services packages depending on the ACI deployment life cycle. Metsi also provides ACI training classes and ACI mentored installs, to enable the customers’ internal teams. Finally, Metsi provides ACI automation services to leverage the open APIs in ACI.