Cisco is significantly spreading its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology to help customers grow and control hybrid, multicloud and SD-WAN environments.
ACI is Cisco’s flagship software-defined networking (SDN) data-center package, but it also delivers the company’s Intent-Based Networking technology, which brings customers the ability to automatically implement network and policy changes on the fly and ensure data delivery.
Cisco has extended ACI through a program and technology known as ACI Anywhere that gives customers the flexibility to run and control applications anywhere they want across private or public clouds or at the edge while maintaining consistent network and security policies across their entire domain. ACI Anywhere implementations today include Cisco’s Application Policy Infrastructure Controller, ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator and Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000V.
ACI Anywhere would, for example, let policies configured through Cisco’s SDN Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) use native APIs offered by a public-cloud provider to orchestrate changes within both the private and public cloud environments, Cisco said. The Orchestrator helps provision and manage the implementation across multiple sites and services.