We performed a comparison between Cisco ACI and Juniper Contrail Networking based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It is easy to use because you have all the information coming from the same technology."
"The stability is perfect. We have had no problems with Cisco ACI."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Cisco ACI are micro-segmentation, the VXLAN, and the ACI flattening services."
"ACI's most valuable feature is sizing - you can easily find the sizing of the data, which means the data speed, CPU, and virtualization can be determined."
"With its programmability, you can do stuff to policies to make them more flexible, allowing you to connect devices in new ways."
"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."
"ACI's most valuable feature is its SDN capabilities. Everything is on your software design controller. Everything is blocked by default until you allow it."
"After we finished setting Contrail up, it seemed stable enough. Still, we never tested it in a real environment, so we don't have enough information to say whether it's stable with a given number of users and appliances. We have tested it in a lab environment, but we haven't tested enough to say that the platform is stable."
"Juniper Contrail Networking is a stable solution."
"It provides proactive alerting in a single dashboard solution."
"Since it is a new technology, Cisco moved all the menus. This made it tricky to use."
"Its graphical user interface (GUI) is not as user-friendly as it could be."
"We had issues in the first deployment when we tried to finish the migration from traditional networking to Cisco ACI."
"They should improve the GUI, make it simpler. They also need to improve its integration with other automation tools."
"I think that technical support tickets should be escalated sooner."
"Biannually, there is a new design delivered by Cisco. Thus, you are always running behind the new design, and it never stops. With Cisco ACI, this has been a nightmare."
"In terms of improvement, I would like to see some sort of way to baseline the system in a network-centric fashion."
"The firewall has room for improvement because there is no central inspection yet on Cisco ACI."
"Juniper needs to address the market's specific requirements, such as the SME sector, and offer more lower-priced products like a lower-end segment switch."
"Visibility, especially for the top of the platform, is a nightmare. The top was documented incorrectly and really complex to complete. In the end, it worked but only after several weeks of work with the support of a Juniper solution engineer in Holland."
"Juniper Contrail Networking is difficult if you do not have a certificate for Juniper. Juniper is a different type of configuration or operation than Cisco."
Cisco ACI is ranked 2nd in Software Defined Networking (SDN) with 96 reviews while Juniper Contrail Networking is ranked 4th in Software Defined Networking (SDN) with 3 reviews. Cisco ACI is rated 8.0, while Juniper Contrail Networking is rated 7.0. The top reviewer of Cisco ACI writes "Stable, easy to extend, scalable, and has a host-based routing feature". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Juniper Contrail Networking writes "Smart configuration management eliminates the need to worry about managing the network's configurations". Cisco ACI is most compared with VMware NSX, Cisco Secure Workload, Nuage Networks, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and HPE SDN, whereas Juniper Contrail Networking is most compared with Tungsten Fabric, VMware NSX, Cisco SD-WAN, VMware SD-WAN and HPE SDN. See our Cisco ACI vs. Juniper Contrail Networking report.
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