We have followed the development and use of Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) over the past five years. Cisco ACI delivers an intent-based networking framework to enable agility in the data center. It captures higher-level business and user intent in the form of a policy and translates this intent into the network constructs necessary to dynamically provision the network, security, and infrastructure services.

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While ACI is an innovative approach to the challenges of traditional networks from scale, operations and management, security, and agility perspectives, we were interested to see how the promise of new technological approach manifested themselves in the market and how it has been applied to solve business challenges.

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We developed a paper that provided an overview of traditional network challenges, a summary of how Cisco ACI solves these challenges, and most importantly, how actual customers feel about the product, their migration journey, and realization of benefits.

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ACI has lived up to the promise of efficient network operations, enhanced security, increased scale and ultimately a more agile and flexible infrastructure. One significant takeaway is that potential customers need to look at what others have done in order to minimize effort and maximize benefit. To that end, a section on best practices is provided.