What is Cisco ACI and How Does it Help Manage the Data Center?

Have you ever wondered how the data centers at Amazon and Microsoft are managed to such a high degree of efficiency? Tools like Cisco ACI offer network engineers the capacity to maintain these large network infrastructures. Let’s dive into what Cisco ACI is and how it helps manage the data center. 

Ready to Learn How to Use Cisco ACI?

Network automation is one of the coolest things to learn in IT. It’s amazing what you can do with a little bit of code and the right tools. AWS, Microsoft, and even ISPs like Comcast can deploy and maintain massively large networks thanks to network automation, and we haven’t even touched on how Cisco ACI can help with Infosec. That’s a whole other topic of amazing things to learn!

If you want to learn how to use Cisco ACI, or if you are an aspiring network engineer that wants to work in a data center, start studying for the Cisco CCNP Service Provider certification. The CCNP is not easy to get. This isn’t your A+ cert, and because of that, the CCNP is highly coveted. It proves you know your stuff. 

It’s never too early to start learning the material covered in the CCNP exams. Everything you’ll learn in a CCNP training course can be applied outside of the data center. It’s really knowledge that will follow you for your entire IT career.

What is Cisco ACI?

If you have ever walked through the network operations of a medium or large business, you might appreciate the sheer amount of hardware that needs to be managed. Data centers contain far more switches and routers compared to what a normal business, even a manufacturing facility, typically contains. So, how do data centers manage that much equipment without a small army network of engineers? The answer is automation.

As the data center grew and became more complicated, network engineers called on hardware vendors to create more robust tools for them. Businesses needed a better way to manage their networks, and as cyber-attacks became more prevalent, organizations needed more robust mechanisms to secure their networks.

No one wants Skynet, but it couldn't hurt if networks were a little autonomous. 

So, in 2013, Cisco released a new line of products that introduced their software-defined networking solution. This was the Cisco Nexus series of products. 

The Nexus line of equipment was built from the ground up for spine-leaf architectures with a sprinkle of automation on top. Management tools were moved from the traditional CLI to software-based management dashboards. 

By now, it wouldn’t surprise you to hear that ACI stands for Application Centric Infrastructure. That’s because of how ACI works. We just implied that before software-defined networking was introduced that network engineers needed to use the CLI to manage their networks. This process was cumbersome.

Network engineers needed to remotely connect to hardware equipment to configure or fix them. They used the command line to issue commands manually. This also meant that network engineers needed to keep careful notes, diagrams, and well-documented tickets to track how the network was built or what changes were made to it along the way. 

That changed with software-defined networking. The Cisco ACI includes applications like the Nexus Dashboard, a Nexus Orchestration Panel, and even a handy metrics dashboard. Configuration and management now live in a web interface where the nitty gritty commands are abstracted behind buttons and levers. 

How Does Cisco ACI Help Manage the Data Center?

In the previous section, we explained what Cisco ACI is. Now, let’s explain how Cisco ACI can help manage the data center. 

Modern data centers use something called spine-leaf architecture. This architecture is used to ensure there is always a path for packets to flow through while increasing performance. The spine-leaf architecture does this by connecting every single leaf to each spine in the network. Spines are not connected to each other though. Instead, spines are connected to the core network. 

By configuring the physical layer of a network in this way, data always has a redundant path to flow through the network even if a Mac truck plows through the wall of the data center and takes out half the server racks in it. However, the spine-leaf architecture uses far more interconnects and switches than a typical three-tier network. That makes it much more difficult to manage. 

Likewise, data centers typically provide services for multiple customers. Even large business data centers need to be highly configurable. 

For example, AWS needs to be able to provision private networks that sit inside of their physical infrastructure for customers on the fly. This is a service they provide, and each private network needs to be segmented from all other AWS customers.

A company like Ford or Chevrolet may have different requirements. They may need to open their network infrastructure to dealerships or mechanics. By extending their business network into private dealerships, they have the potential to provide more secure and robust financing options or a way to share proprietary engineering data with mechanics. 

As you can imagine, manually configuring and maintaining these types of large networks would be next to impossible. Cisco ACI helps manage the data center by automating these operations. 

Regarding the AWS example above, if a customer requests a new private network for their business, network automation tools can be leveraged to automatically deploy that network. Likewise, if part of a data center is experiencing a massive amount of congestion, automation tools like Cisco ACI can ‘self-heal’ the network and re-route congested network paths. 

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of different ways that Cisco ACI helps manage the data center, but to sum it up, the Cisco dashboards that power ACI make network automation far less complex and use machine learning to automatically predict, manage, and remediate networking issues in the data center.