Cisco simplifies Application Lifecycle Management

During the unveiling of ACI, and in a blog post, Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers discussed the imperative for IT to adapt quickly to the needs of the application economy. Applications have become the lifeblood of business. The consistent and high performance of applications is vital to CIOs’ ability to deliver new products and services, manage risk and security threats, empower employees, and drive productivity into their organizations. As billions of new valuable connections form to create an Internet of Everything that most of us will experience through applications, the focus on rapid and consistent application deployment becomes even greater.

Today, the complexity and inflexibility of IT is slowing business down. IT professionals work in separate inefficient siloes because current technology doesn’t support a shared architectural model, and there is no way to gain a single view of all the hardware and software components that impact application performance. As a result, the IT components are difficult to configure, complex to troubleshoot, and cumbersome to change.
CIOs want to break down these silos and unify all the component parts of IT– networking, storage, compute, network services, applications, security– and manage them as a single, dynamic, entity without compromise: that’s what ACI accomplishes. ACI couples innovations in software, hardware, systems and ASICS with a dynamic, application-aware network policy model built around open APIs to reduce application deployment from months to minutes. ACI achieves this by unifying physical and virtual networks and offering security, compliance and real-time visibility at the system, tenant, and application levels at unprecedented scale. Cisco ACI data center switching innovations allow the network to rapidly respond to application development teams, while delivering up to 75 percent total cost of ownership savings compared to merchant silicon-based switches and software-only network virtualization solutions.

ACI is comprised of the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), the Nexus 9000 portfolio, and enhanced versions of the NX-OS operating system. The Nexus 9000 family, running optimized NX-OS, enables unmatched “zero-touch” operations across high performance data center networks, and can save customers millions of dollars in capital and operating expenses.

The new Nexus 9000 is also the foundation building block for the Cisco ACI solution, enabling a smooth transition from optimized NX-OS to the ACI-mode of NX-OS with a software upgrade and the addition of APIC. Using merchant silicon and custom ASICs, this portfolio delivers best of breed price performance and non-blocking port density for 1/10G to 10/40G and in the future 100G transitions in existing and next generation data centers. The Nexus 9000 portfolio includes state of the art system innovations including the industry’s first backplane-free modular switch to provide investment protection, efficient power and cooling, and a simpler design leading to two times the improvement in mean time between failures.
Based on industry standards, Cisco ACI enables IT to meet business demands for new applications, rapid scale to existing ones, and automatic tear-down of applications that are no longer required. ACI accelerates application deployment cycles to drive faster business processes and improve bottom line results.

· Delivers 75 percent total cost of ownership savings versus software only-network virtualization, eliminating the per VM Tax, leveraging existing cabling investments, and delivering the most efficient modular data center switch via an innovative backplane free design reducing power and cooling costs by 15 percent
· Accelerates Application Deployment Time to Minutes improving business agility through centralized management, application network profiles, L4-7 network service automation, and open APIs
· Centralizes Policy Management Simplifying Operations and Empowering IT Teams through system wide policy control unlocking the power of collaboration across application, network, security, virtualization, compute and storage teams
· Unparalleled Investment Protection through Open Protocols, APIs and Standards leveraging customers’ existing: networking, services including security, physical and virtual compute, and storage assets

The Nexus 9000 portfolio delivers several industry firsts including innovations in software, hardware, systems, and ASICs unifying physical and virtual infrastructures delivering uncompromised:
· Flexibility and Simplicity: Decoupling application centric policy from IP infrastructure enables full host mobility, offers centralized policy control, and greatly simplifies network operation. The network adapts to application requirements through dynamic insertion and chaining of physical and virtual L4-7 network services including firewalls, application delivery controllers, and intrusion detection systems.
· Performance and Scale: Delivering security and application policy at line rate 10/40 and in the future 100G. 60 Tbps of switching capacity, 3X faster multicast performance and 1/3 the latency at 3X the traffic load of any other Data Center modular switch tested, 20% greater non-blocking port density – 576 40G line rate ports with 50%+ reduction in ASICs per module compared to merchant silicon only competitors. Unprecedented scale including 1M endpoints, 55K+ 10G ports, 64K+ tenants. Built in dynamic load balancing and prioritization removes network bottlenecks and can enhance application completion time from 30 - 90%.
· Security: Improves application security, compliance, auditing, and mobility through centralized, programmable policy, enabling fine grained control and isolation at scale suitable for multitenant private and public cloud environments; open platform enables a broad security ecosystem driving innovation in security management automation, visibility, and choice including Cisco’s new ASAv.
· Real-time Visibility and Troubleshooting: Complete, real-time view of per tenant and per application health, statistics, and troubleshooting across physical and virtual infrastructure, real-time analytics driving intelligent application placement decisions. Ability to monitor and isolate packet drops by application at a system level to accelerate problem resolution.
· Open Platform and Open Source: Industry’s 1st open and extensible application policy model for automation and visibility with hardware acceleration, open comprehensive RESTful APIs enabling tight integration with existing network automation tools, and open source community driven ACI extensions including OpenStack, Open Daylight, virtual switches and VXLAN. Open APIs enable a comprehensive ACI ecosystem for management, orchestration, monitoring, virtualization, network service, and storage partners.
· Broad Virtualization Support: Automated virtual network policy management and telemetry with Microsoft Hyper-V, RedHat KVM, VMware vSphere and other virtualization platforms; Cisco is also introducing the Cisco Application Virtual Switch (AVS) purpose built for ACI virtual environments.
· Advanced Programmability: Designed to fit seamlessly into a development operations team via a RESTful API for enabling automation and tight integration. Puppet, Chef, CFEngine, Python scripting, and other tools enable customers to leverage common toolsets across their infrastructure.
· System Innovations: Industry’s first backplane free design for a modular data center switch providing future proofing for 100G and beyond and improving by 15% power and cooling efficiency, 40G Bidi Optics eases the transition to 40G with zero fiber costs, atomic counters for system level telemetry, and built in line rate directory service supporting 1M endpoints.

Components of Application Centric Infrastructure

Cisco Nexus 9000 switch family
The Nexus 9000 Series offers modular and fixed 1/10/40 Gigabit Ethernet switch configurations. They are designed to operate in either standalone NX-OS mode or in ACI mode to take full advantage of ACI’s application policy driven services and infrastructure automation features. This dual capability provides investment protection and a migration path to ACI though a software upgrade. The portfolio includes:
· Cisco Nexus 9508 Switch: an 8 slot, compact 13 RU form factor chassis designed for high density End-of-Row (EoR) and high performance 10/40GbE aggregation layer deployments.
· Cisco Nexus 9300 Switches: fixed switches designed for top-of-rack and middle-of-row deployments.
o Cisco Nexus 9396PX Switch - a 960G switch with 48 fixed 10GE SFP+ ports and 12 40-Gbps QSFP+ ports
o Cisco Nexus 93128TX - a 1.28T switch with 96 fixed 1/10GBASE-T ports and 8 40-Gbps QSFP+ ports
In the first half of 2014 the Nexus 9000 switch family will be extended to include a four-slot and 16-slot system and additional top of rack switches. More details will be released over the coming months.

The Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (Cisco APIC) is the unified point of automation and management for the ACI fabric, policy programming, and health monitoring. It optimizes performance, supports any application anywhere, and unifies management of physical and virtual infrastructure. The APIC is a highly scalable, clustered software controller capable of managing 1M endpoints. Unlike traditional SDN controllers, it operates independently of switch data and control planes allowing the network to respond to endpoint changes even when the APIC is offline. It enables tremendous flexibility in how application networks are defined and automated and is designed from the ground up for programmability and centralized management.

Application Network Profiles define the requirements of an application and its interdependencies on the underlying infrastructure. APIC leverages these profiles to dynamically provision networking, services, compute storage and security policies, no matter where the application is, or how it changes.

Cisco Virtual ASA (ASAv) provides the first fully integrated security services based on application needs designed specifically for ACI. ASAv scales on demand and operates seamlessly in both physical and virtual environments with tight integration with APIC. This simplifies security administration and allows organizations to take a holistic, policy-based approach to data center security without compromising functionality.

The Cisco Application Virtual Switch (Cisco AVS) is an ACI-enabled virtual switch that is optimized for consistent policy enforcement, providing improved visibility and performance of applications running on ACI. The distributed virtual switch is managed by the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller for centralized provisioning and orchestration.

ACI Ecosystem
Cisco also announced today an ecosystem of industry leaders to help customers leverage, customize and extend their existing IT investments through Cisco ACI. Technology leaders that support today’s announcement include: BMC, Computer Associates, Citrix, EMC, Embrane, Emulex, F5, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, OpsCode, Panduit, Puppet Labs, Niksun, Red Hat, SAP, Splunk, Symantec, VCE, and VMware.

Comprehensive Services and Programs Enable Customer Migration to ACI
Designed to help customers achieve their business and technical objectives while reducing risk, Cisco Services for ACI span the data center and offer a range of professional and technical services. These services include Cisco Readiness Planning, Cisco Quick Start Service for Nexus 9000, and Cisco Accelerated Deployment Services for Nexus 9000. In addition Cisco’s Technology Migration Program assists customers migrating from legacy infrastructure. Cisco offers new services to secure data center infrastructure: Cisco Data Center Security Posture, Assessment, Plan and Build, and Optimization Services.