Cisco ACI Scalability

Vasil Mitrov - PeerSpot reviewer
Telecom Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Cisco ACI is a very scalable solution, and you can always add another site to the existing architecture, either over the internet or with dark fiber. It has become an extension of the same data center.

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Eyal Amar - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Manager for Networking/DC team at Malam-Team

Most of our clients for Cisco ACI are enterprise businesses.

I rate Cisco ACI ten out of ten for scalability.

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RK
Senior DGM at Bharat Electronics Limited

ACI's scalability is good - I would rate it 4.5 out of five.

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Buyer's Guide
Cisco ACI
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco ACI. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SG
Post Sales Manager at Vcom Teachnologies

It's quite scalable. I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. We have features like fabric provision and tenant isolation, which makes it competitive with other OEMs.

We have enterprises primarily as our customers. 

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Farhan_Mohamed - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Solutions Architect at NTT Ltd.

The scalability is pretty good. You should have two of the spines altogether. Then the leaves can expand when you want to have more bandwidth or more throughput requirement.

If you need more computing power or networking power in the data center, then you have to add the leaves. Of course, if you need more throughput power, it's a bit different. For example, if one spine has the power of 4GBs, the two spines, which are combined, give the power of 8GBs, if you want more throughput, for example, 50GBs, you just go and add a couple of spines to it to commit to that sort of power. 

We tend to work with medium to large organizations.

I'd rate the scalability seven out of ten.

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MK
Datacenter & Infrastructure Senior Engineer at BMB

Scalability is another powerful feature of Cisco ACI. For example, if you need to add another endpoint, you don't need to redesign your network. You can simply add a switch or a leaf switch and you're good to go. If you need to increase the number of devices or add more bundles, you can add a spine switch or a backbone switch without any redesign because the fabric is initialized from zero. You can add or delete devices without the need for a complete redesign. So it's a very scalable solution, and scalability is the most powerful feature of Cisco ACI.

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AS
Technical Marketing Engineer - Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Cisco ACI is a scalable solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give scalability a ten.

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VN
Data Center Consulting Engineer at Techrun Stock Exchange

I rate the scalability of ACI as nine out of ten, leaving room for potential improvements or aspects that I haven't explored fully.

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Ehsan Emad - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT at Synnapex

I believe that Cisco ACI is highly scalable. Anytime that you want to add bandwidth, you just need to add a spine and anytime you need more ports, you just need to add that. And the very cool feature is the different typology that ACI can support now. Before that, it was a stretch, especially the typology. Nowadays, everyone is talking about the IPN and the multi-part.

For bigger operations with different data centers in different locations, you can deploy multi-site and it also offers some support remotely. I've never deployed it, but you can use a virtual peak that gives this and also enables a multi-tier. That's also very helpful with customers that don't want to spend a lot of money for the cable or transceivers. And the hardware is massive. I really love the hardware. The MTBF is huge. Everything is stable.

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JM
Network Architect at a government with 10,001+ employees

We haven't had any problems with scaling the platform because it's easy to add a leaf or spine.

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AL
Manager at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

You can scale the solution, but you cannot scale to other products. I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability. 

For backup you might want two people, but one person can handle all of the maintenance. Everything is managed centrally. This is a backend product, so not everyone knows they are using Cisco ACI. The organization I currently work for has over 10,000 employees, and practically everyone is involved in usage of the solution. 

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RS
Manager Network & Communication Engineer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The scalability is okay. 

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DT
Sr Manager at Cognizant

Cisco ACI is very scalable. There's no real length to it. If you look at ACI, you can have an endless number of layers. 

The size of our environment is about 2,000 nodes. It's not a huge network, it's pretty medium-sized.

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LS
Major Change Supervisor at Vodafone

Scalability is pretty good. 

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VP
Network Architect at Neev limited

Scalability-wise, Cisco ACI is a good solution because you can have more than five thousand servers in one ACI fabric. There's a lot of flexibility and scalability in Cisco ACI because you can even seamlessly integrate it with legacy infrastructure despite having a different data center.

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Enric Cuixeres - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Information Technology at Leng-d'Or

I rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten. My company has around 150 users for the solution. 

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MasoudSabouri - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Consultant at Telcoset

The solution is scalable; you can have multi-site scenarios. 

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JS
Network Manager at California Department of Corrections

We have not hit the limit, so it's been very scalable for us. Redundancy has been great.

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KL
Solution Consultant at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

While supposedly it's scalable, the program is not. I don't have any data point that I can provide for scalability within ACI, as our environment is fairly small.

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GR
Network Engineer at Direction des Systemes d'Information, Etat de Vaud

The scalability is good.

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Habi Darr - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Network & Security Architect at The Juice Plus+ Company

Cisco ACI is scalable.

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MR
Network Engineer at Societe Generale

The scalability is okay. We are deploying the leaf switches one-to-one.

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NF
Networking Specialist at Saudi Business Machines - SBM

While I acknowledge that the solution is scalable, there are occasional bugs and the need for upgrades or adjustments approximately every five years. We operate on multiple levels, with small, medium, and high scalability organizations. Typically, we opt for the highest scalable level during our implementations. I would rate its scalability at seven out of ten.

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FJ
Chief Security Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

I give the scalability an eight out of ten.

We have around 10,000 people in our organization.

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RD
Network Consulting Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The scalability is great. This is the greatest feature of the technology. It is a great improvement in scaling out. It can greatly increase the overall scalability of the Fabric with multi-port and multi side, making it a great product.

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MH
Lead Network Engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Scalability is great in a Cisco ACI environment. But when you're migrating from an old data center into ACI, there are some challenges. 

In all the people that manage it, most are just trying to throw entire networks with multiple environments on them into ACI. It's good but it also has a lot of challenges for us.

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Stephane Deroch - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Architect at Air France

It is really scalable. It is the most scalable product that I have tried.

We have been one year on the project and it is very scalable. We have tested it in our data centres, and it's easy to add more automation processes.

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PauloDiniz - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Leader - Data Center at YSSY & Co

It's scalable.

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GR
Information Security Architect at Progress Software Corporation

The project is pretty small, but from what we have seen, it is scalable.

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IA
Network Consultant at Onstack Inc

I would give the solution's scalability an eight out of ten. The scalability options are really good. You just connect the leaves to the spine and it comes up. The scalability is not an issue.

The biggest environment I've worked with has two spines, spines with 16 leaves.

In terms of the number of users on it, initially it was really difficult for customers to adopt the new technology because it was a wholly new concept. Now, with time, and as ACI comes out with the new features, and the stability is really strong, the adoption is really good. According to Cisco engineers, they have customers who have gone up to 6,000 users.

Regarding the possibility of our customers' increasing their usage of ACI, we don't see that much indication of it, because what the customers are looking is more along the lines of having their fabric be more redundant. One of the features engineers are looking for is the Endpoint Tracker, which has had some issues. It is not that user-friendly.

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SA
Director Design, Architecture & Security at Syntax Systems GmbH & Co KG

We like its scalability because we have use its paths to bring all the networks into ACI. Therefore, we need to be able to scale.

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PK
Assistant Vice President at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

This solution is scalable. We are system integrators providing solutions to our customers. Approximately fifty percent of our customers are using ACI. 

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LC
Consultant Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

It's scalable.

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PI
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

In terms of scalability, you can go with the two-spine and get very good bandwidth, but if you need more than this you can increase the spine count. If you need more devices you can increase the leaf count. Scalability is there.

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FN
Network and Security Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We chose Cisco ACI because of its scalability.

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AD
IT Networker Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

There are no issues with scalability. We can easily scale. 

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DB
Network Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

It's easy to keep adding. You have a set where you just add another leaf to your ACI fabric. 

I can scale quite easily. Just add another leaf to my ACI fabric. It seems straightforward.

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BJ
Senior Network Engineer

The scalability has been great. It is very easy to scale. We are quite a big customer, so we had some scalability issues with the older, multi-part environment versions of Cisco products.

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MB
Network Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Scalability is another point for our cloud project. We use Cisco ACI, because when we expand the network another 10 to 20 switches more, the switches are easier to implement now. We  connect the new switches to the spine infrastructure, then they are the switches are ready to configure.

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SS
Senior Network Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability is definitely something that we are looking at and that's one of the attractive features of ACI for us. It's one configuration interface and if you want to add more interface you just buy more gear and plug it in. It's almost a plug and play solution. We just don't know how our business is going to grow and change over time. We can buy and implement something today and they can come and say that they are doing an acquisition or some sort of growth or new business venture and we need more capacity in the data center. With ACI, if you need more capacity you can just buy more and plug them in without needing to do anything else. All of the sudden that infrastructure is there for me to use, configure, and add stuff to.

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SA
IT Solution Architect at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of scalability there is just one limitation. When you want the security rules and features to be applied on the application NIC level - on the virtual NIC level, on the network interface level, on the application itself, on the virtualization domain - you cannot do that. The application needs to reach via API so you can apply the security policy. Then the security policies will be applied and then it can talk to other applications. This is one thing that is missing on ACI. But you cannot say that it's actually missing because that's the overlay approach of SDN; it's not underlay like NSX.

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DG
Technology Support Specialist at Fujitsu

It's scalable because of the spine-and-leaf infrastructure. You can add spine and leaf. I haven't scaled it that much. We've only used three or four leaves into the ACI infrastructure. But I believe the scalability is good.

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MD
Network Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

The scalability is very good. This is one of the best features, because you can add it at any time, then scale as needed.

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AJ
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It is scalable. We have a lot of devices. Our network have tens of thousands of devices.

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OB
Platform Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is very scalable and easy to add new devices on, which is very good.

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BH
Senior Network Engineer at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

In terms of scalability, we haven't grown the deployment yet and we are nowhere near capacity. But it seems like it is relatively scalable in terms of what we could use. It's a matter of what do we need. I just haven't had the opportunity to increase the scale of what we have right now.

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CB
Network Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Scalability has mostly been perfectly adequate for what we have needed so far. We have not hit too many limits.

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it_user1000944 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network and Security Engineer at Lutech Group

It has large scalability. You can deploy a new pod, rack, or service in just a few of minutes instead of hours or days of work. 

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GC
Data Center Implementation Engineer at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

The solution is extremely scalable in ways that pure hardware solutions were incapable of.

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AD
IT Evolution Manager at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We are not that big to reach the limit (or edges) of this technology. Its scalability is fine. It is very easy to scale. 

Today, doing changes to the infrastructure is a nightmare. Every single device has different programs and programmatics. However, with this tool, you simply plug and play. When you want to scale, you add one piece, and it's done. It works.

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RK
Solution Architect

Cisco ACI is scalable and easy to expand. Cisco ACI is a data center concept. We have 1000 servers.

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KC
Network Engineer at CS Computer Systems

The scalability is impressive. I think the best thing about that is the vendor-agnostic part. In the lab, we did a VMware deployment from what I heard it doesn't matter how the VM is deployed, it can integrate with ACI and you can manage it from the Epic controller.

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HS
Network Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

It is quite scalable. It is one of the most scalable products we have come across.

We have five people who are using it in our company in Portugal.

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MW
Assistant Director IT at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The scalability is great. You get more capacity. You can extend it to another data center remotely. 

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DG
Director of Network and Security at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

This is a highly scalable solution, and we are running it in some really large environments. We have ACI installed in data centers that have more than one hundred leaps, which is thousands of servers.

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JB
Systems Network Manager at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability is definitely something that we're looking at, and it's one of the attractive features of ACI for us. It is easy to do.

The way ACI works is it is one configuration interface. If you want to add more then you just plug it in. I would not call it plug-and-play, but they've made it to the point where it is very close. 

This is important to us because we just don't know how our business is going to grow, and change, over time. It's a moving target for us. If we buy something today, and then there is a demand for more capacity in the data center, then we just have to buy more devices and plug them in. We don't have to do anything else. The infrastructure just becomes available for us to use. This differs considerably from the traditional Cisco, which involved a lot of command lines and configuration.

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PC
Sr. Voice Engineer at SGWS

The scalability is really good.

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RV
Systems Engineer at a tech services company

While I haven't done big installs, it does seem like it would scale well.

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ND
Project Manager at Radio France

We have not thought about scaling at this time.

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PS
Network Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Before scaling, you have to develop the scripts.

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AW
Network Specialist at a comms service provider

Its scalability is very good. It is really easy to scale in this product.

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ML
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The scalability of the product seems great. It doesn't seem to have too many limitations if you want to scale out. We haven't run into any issues yet.

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BE
Network Manager at a university with 501-1,000 employees

We haven't really grown or changed the network since this solution was installed, so I cannot comment on scalability.

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NK
Sr Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

The scalability is very good, based on the spine-leaf structure. You can increase the number of leaves and you can also scale the spines. You can deploy four spines, eight spines.

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GD
Specialist Lab Network at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

There's a lot of options with scalability. There's a limit of 1000 devices.

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NetworkE4953 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has very good scalability. 

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MD
ICT Expert at Orange Polska

The scalability is good. At the moment, we are using about 18 percent of the solution. In a few months, when we grow, we should be using more performance of the solution.

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JP
Senior Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

In terms of scalability, this solution is pretty good.

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TM
Infrastructure Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

The scalability of the solution I cannot rate at this time since I just started.

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TM
Technology Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It is scalable, although it depends on the design and the customer.

This is not a product for small-scale users. If we have customers with large data center requirements, we offer them Cisco ACI. For example, it is not for small enterprises without a lot of services running in their data center.

Scaling is easy because we can add, as required. While it depends on the design, scalability is not normally an issue.

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EK
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

So far, the scalability has been good. It has been better than other products.

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PJ
Professional Services Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The product is scalable. You can scale east-west by adding in additional leaf switches. I haven't experienced any scale issues so far, which is good.

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it_user302127 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The scalability is very good, as the controller automatically detects new additions and scales itself. It's agile because it's a cloud-based network.

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An Quang Vu Phan Phan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Networking Pre-sales Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The scalability depends on the hardware performance. Most of vendors use the traditional chip such as Broadcom , so I suppose the performance and scalability of ACI switches are the same as other competitors. 

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NP
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The scalability of Cisco ACI is good so far.

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RG
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

There is a scalability path on the Cisco website. We are currently working on scaling the product.

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SA
Senior Network Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This solution is both scalable and stable.

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VD
Pre-sales Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

On paper, it scales.

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DK
IT Network at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees

I have seen the guide for scalability and I think it's great. I have no complaints. 

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AH
Sr. IT System Administration at a government with 10,001+ employees

I would rate the scalability about a ten.

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SP
Principal Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Our deployment is very small, so I'm not the right guy to speak with about scalability.

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AH
Network Engineer at a political organization with 10,001+ employees

It is pretty scalable.

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PM
Network Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I deployed it in a small environment (a lab), so I cannot comment on scalability.

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AM
Project Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The scalability's capabilities are very good for our needs.

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AS
Cloud Advisory Consultant at Accenture

The scalability is perfect. It is one of the main reasons that we install it.

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Buyer's Guide
Cisco ACI
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco ACI. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.