Cisco ACI improved the stability of our IT system and our data center.

The efficiency in terms of the data center latency has been reduced by around 20-30%. Our applications function a lot better. We get a lot of intuitive data to know how our application stack is performing. 

Our customer has around 1,000 virtual machines and before, they were all 100 physical servers which, on our side, were obviously consuming energy and resources. Now everything is on the customer and so it's up to them to manage the size of the virtual machines. 

Historically, we had four different computer rooms, and they were all configured differently.  When we went through the refresh and started using ACI, it was the first time that we had a consistent setup in all of our computer rooms.

ACI divides the management process in the network. It's a software-defined solution.

It is now easier than before we had ACI to configure any new changes into our data center.

We will improve our organization using the automation.

The customer is in a phase where they are building all the Fabric and moving everything. Therefore, it is early to discuss the use case. In the short-term, they plan to use ACI Fabric  to replace everything (their entire infrastructure) that they have at the moment. 

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. 

It has been able to  transverse all the processes between two companies merging into one: Air France and KLM.

The improvement I have seen after ACI has been implemented is that companies that wanted to implement a service lifecycle of any services, or that wanted to do automation, really improved their deployment times. Once the fabric is up, then they can start doing so. Customers usually get confused and think that if they implement ACI then everything gets automated. No. That's a mistake. With ACI, you have to buy software, an automation orchestration tool like Ansible, UCSD, or vRealize - tools to automate.

The improvement is that when companies buy an automation tool with Cisco ACI, the deployment time, their designs, are really fast. 

Another improvement is that customers say that the performance is really good with their new network.

We had different networks and combined them with ACI so we could have the control of one controller-based network. Also, everything is combined now. Automation is running so that the operational effort was reduct massivley.

Some of our cloud-based customers integrate it with UCS Director or CloudCenter and are able to automate services. ACI supports automation, like Ansible automation or HTTP automation. It adds stability for cloud-deployment use cases. Cloud-based businesses don't need to create policies. They can do so with an automation orchestration tool like UCS Director or CloudCenter. A few customers are using it this way.

Some other customers are refreshing their data centers with SDN. They have a traditional data center but they want to restructure it. Cisco customers are now going for the Cisco SDN.

It has reduced our day-to-day operations by at least half.

It has helped to improve our organization in the automation front. We integrated it with vCenter and Microsoft Hyper-V. 

Currently, we are not on the cloud. We have a private cloud deployment.

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.

It improved the speed of the daily business. With the preconfigured workflows, daily business task are now done more quickly than in the past. 

• A lot of our tasks in cloud projects are now done faster than before. 
• We can implement customer requirements more quickly. 
• Our quality has improved because we have faster visibility into when faults occurs in the network.

We're just starting to deploy it. We literally just bought it and we're getting ready to start. 

Normally, when you're configuring your core switches and your normal switching fabric, like Nexus or any of the HP platforms, you configure VLANs. If you're dividing a switch, you configure a virtual device contact. Instead of this, you have different tenants for your different environments, different segments. And you have automation on top of it if you are running virtualization domains. It removes the traditional networking configuration and gives you complete control over your switching fabric from one controller.

Also, it has APIs. You can use REST APIs and you can have configuration already built in for your XML code or GSM files. You can push it using different tools like Postman. You can have different types of Python scripts and you can have these types of automation if you want to play with the API. It will provide faster provisioning of network and faster provisioning of your applications. 

If you go for full automation, you can build your own tools. I have my own tools that I built in Python. If I want to configure EPG or interface, I configure some parameters on my script, it will push to ACI, and it will configure it.

In terms of time saved, any new provisioning of services or new applications will take less than one minute on. I gave one IP to my system team to configure the IP on the application and tag the EPG on the application data. It was just a matter of tagging.

It has made it simpler and easier for non-Cisco personnel to come in and configure stuff because it is easier to understand, compared to when you configure Nexus using the CLI. Configuring the ACI using the graphical interface is easier. That's one advantage. New administrators can easily jump in and manage the system.

It saves time.

It has made it much easier to deploy and make changes in the data center versus the previous infrastructure, which was NX-OS based.

It has saved me a couple of times, as just a backup feature.

We have an old switches and catalysts. This product makes things easier. Once everything is on Fabric, their routes are bounced around within the Fabric, so you don't have to configure new switchboards or parts. It does makes it that much easier.

Before we started using Cisco ACI, everything was essentially flat open access. By using ACI, we're able to segment out everything and get more visibility into our virtual environment. We are basically 99.99% virtual at our data center. There are many features we haven't even started using, but we will get there. 

We are service providers. It has allowed us to serve some of our outsourced customers better than the previous generation of products.

ACI provides network ability to deploy and respond to the needs of applications, both in the data center and in the cloud.

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.

Financially, it should be an improvement because we expect everything will converge in the tool. Therefore, we can change the way that we invest money in resources. Today, we have to keep a very wide range of skill resources in the company. Going forward, we will be able to focus in more specific skills that will allow us to keep the new tool up and running. It's a big change of approach, but in the long run, it will provide us a lot of benefits. The benefit is the finance of our IT will change.

This product has improved our organization through automation.

Now, our customers have tiers of management that have meetings with about the simplest tasks because it has to be approved from upper management and senior management and by the time it gets to the engineer that's going to deploy it, it takes way too long. With the solution, they can delegate a person who would be in charge of running the ACI as a whole, and it will be much faster because it doesn't have to go through the whole chain of command for the simple task of deploying one little machine on one port in the data center.

This product improved the way our company functions by enabling us to establish our goal of moving to a zero-trust model. That's how Cisco ACI helps us the most.

Prior to ACI, a network upgrade or network change would be much more complex than it is now. Reducing complexity means that it is faster to make changes.

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

I am a partner, and I implement the solution for other organizations.

We use Cisco everywhere in our network, so it makes sense from a compatibility point of view.

Because of its automation feature, when you configure scripts for Cisco ACI, it reduces human error. It is an easy and quick way to do this.

It is more scalable than our previous products. 

The product works very well with our virtual environment.

The solution has allowed us to redesign our data center environment into more of a zone-based network where we can section off areas. It definitely gives us a lot more security and control in our data center.

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.

There is no need to configure all the switches, you can configure them from the device controller.

In day-to-day activity, it creates an installer for a particular VLAN to be implemented. 

Also, I don't need to monitor everything, login to every switch. I can monitor them centrally.

It has benefited my organization by saving us a lot of time. 

It has reduced the time it takes to resolve problems and to understand what colleagues want from inside the company.

This solution is faster than what we had previously.

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

The biggest benefit has been that it has improved communication between my endpoints in the data center.

We are still in the development phase.

The operation and maintenance costs have been reduced. It is also simple to deploy any deployment. Any configuration can be easily done. 

Having a lot of racks and switches with a single point of configuration which can be done with automation on one platform using one API. This makes everything work faster.

We have been able to deploy new applications more efficiently and faster. 

• It's essential for a software defined network.
• Automated systems
• Helps to defend policies that we've created
• Good for automation

It helps us to drive consistent ACI policies and operational best practices to our cloud instances.

It has centralized our projects.

The previous generation of networking, everything was slow, taking days to deploy and run a script. With Cisco ACI, I can deploy things with a script, then run it in five minutes.

It gives us a new way of providing the network.

I don't use it at the organizational level, but in my lab, it has helped me to visualize everything in one click.

We can support multiple VDRs of multiple branch offices at same physical location in the same infrastructure.

We see it is faster, but still needs improvements.