Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. IBM Cloud Internet Services

Cisco ACI is well suited for the user environment like we have in which there are kind of the endpoints or servers are in thousands. So for those environment that is well suited but then in small environment it is not very helpful.

Incentivized

In terms of business challenges, it simplifies the job of my engineers and significantly increases the productivity of my teams when they collaborate with IBM teams all over the world. Now that we have completed a proof-of-concept using the services supplied by IBM, we expect it to assist us in managing them more efficiently; thus far, management has been straightforward.

Incentivized

• So with the old one, we've had a secure zone, core zone, so we have special hardware specific for those zones, so security zones in our data center. This allows us to basically have the spine leaf and we could put any ports in any zone. So it allows a lot more, I'd say efficient use of equipment, being able to plug in things to whatever, and then program it to how you want it to work on.

Incentivized

• Integration with IBM Cloud applications
• Easy to manage web application firewall
• Ease of protecting CloudFoundry applications
• Good console UI
• Protection for rare managed service offerings such as CouchDB through IBM Cloudant

Incentivized

• Getting users up to speed can be especially challenging. I'm not sure how much of that if culture related vs technical skills related, but it's something to keep in mind.
• Along those same lines, engineers who have spent years in the trenches with Catalyst or Nexus environment may struggle with troubleshooting an ACI environment.
• We've had some issues with user errors causing the fabric to go into a virtually unrecoverable state and TAC not always knowing how to fix it.

Incentivized

• Request proxying is done by way of DNS name resolution, which is inflexible.
• Proxy services do not work on wildcard DNS entries.

Incentivized

Cisco ACI is doing exactly what was intended for it to do, that is support our next generation data centre, improve security, and increase resiliency. Migrating to another platform would be a waste of time, resource and energy, which could be better spent migrating more legacy applications into the Cisco ACI fabric.

Incentivized

Cisco ACI has changed the traditional data center model into a new era of automation and agility. The product was considerably easy to deploy met all the expectations. In terms of usability, ACI provides a unified interface for managing the whole infrastructure in one place which is the main benefit for users (admins)

Incentivized

I have seen faster and more user friendly interfaces like Azure

Incentivized

no outages

Incentivized

I do not give it 10 because the platform evolves more and more every day in the data traffic of the datacenter. But the implementations that they carry out for different clients of the platform are very happy with the result of the same over time. Another point that you notice about the platform, despite its good performance, is the low use of energy used by this 24x7 on, it is a good fact to take into account for our environment.

Incentivized

Cisco provides users and partners with a multitude of data for you to consume. I think that the stuff in the public domain goes a long way to assisting you find any answers you may need, plus insights and information from areas such as DevNet provide you with access to more than just the traditional release notes and the like

Incentivized

The Cisco ACI training provided by Cisco was in depth, covered all of our requirements, and allowed us to implement and maintain the platform without issues.

Incentivized

Not applicable

I have used competitors fabric products, however they were unmanaged (no APIC) and manually configured. In this deployment model, all tasks are manual and there is no central controller to monitor and maintain the system. It's also prone to configuration errors as each leaf switch is individually managed. APIC solution is much better.

Incentivized

I have used Salesforce to explore it as an app but I have found them both able to solve my needs and requirements when it comes to security. While I choose IBM Cloud Internet Services for more accessibility, a better price was available with Saleforce. Although that is just my observation.

Incentivized

Cisco ACI scales well and is suited in scenarios such as multi-cloud or large data centre implementations. It is not suited to smaller deployments as the efficiencies that it provides are not fully realised. It is well suited in large environments that contain both virtual and bare-metal machines allowing a great deal of flexibility. It is also perfect to support multi-tenancy platforms.

Incentivized

• Pos: The time it takes to provision the changes we make in the infra. Out other business units can continue their work faster.
• Pos: The stability of the platform as a whole. We never had an outage because of the system.
• Neg: TCO is very high. We still need to buy new stuff when it gets too old.

Incentivized

• It had a positive impact with a big improvement on the performance of web applications.
• Services are quite fast to implement and easy to maintain from an IT perspective.

Incentivized