Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles. It delivers software flexibility with the scalability of hardware performance and facilitates rapid systems integration and customization for network services, monitoring, management, and orchestration with visibility of both physical and virtual networks.
The ACI architecture provides a common management framework for network, application, security and virtualization teams making IT more agile while reducing application deployment time. It is also optimized for running today’s physical and virtual applications along with being ready for tomorrow’s emerging architectures that will need to support an “application anywhere” model with complete freedom of application movement and placement.
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
Our customer, a Financial Services Provider, was going through 2 Data Center migrations, & to negate the requirement in having to reuse hardware & technology coming to EOL soon, they needed to look at a newer, future proof solution. The customer had a requirement to keep the stretched VLANs they utilised in the old network to be available in the new solution as well, this was needed to meet VM migration & storage strategies defined within the business. The EOL hardware had be removed from the final solution, which meant a solution need 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 had worked with the customer to understand their requirements today as well as the future & Cisco ACI Fabric was suggested to compliment the new VM Infrastructure & Storage solution they had chosen. Because of the specific customer requirements, a MultiPod ACI Fabric deployment was selected, providing a single management domain for their SDDC network solution. ACI integrated with the Flashstack solution that was chosen for the Infrastructure & Storage requirements.
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 could now be removed with no impact to services.
Summary
Metsi provided the architectural, solution & design services required to successfully complete the design implementation, configuration & support needed to meet the customer’s requirements. This included working with the customer & their partners during each phase of the project. 2 new Data Centers were deployed using a Cisco ACI MPOD solution & services were successfully migrated into the new solution.
Metsi provided ongoing support for the ACI solution & ACI automation process to leverage the open API used within the ACI solution.