Technology Leaders Rally Behind Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure

NEW YORK, NY, Nov. 6, 2013 – Today, Cisco unveiled a bold new vision and portfolio for the data center that includes an open ecosystem of partners that can help business applications perform with faster on-demand agility for customers.  Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) delivers the first data center and cloud solution to offer full visibility and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources.

Leading companies supporting Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure include: BMC, CA Technologies, Citrix, EMC, Embrane, Emulex, F5, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, Panduit, Puppet Labs, NIKSUN, OpsCode, Red Hat, SAP, Splunk, Symantec, VCE and VMware.

Cisco ACI combines innovation in software, hardware, systems and ASICs with a first-of-its-kind, extensible application-aware network policy model built around open APIs. The open set of APIs enables a comprehensive ecosystem of management, orchestration, monitoring, virtualization, network service, and storage partners. These partners can use ACI’s open and extensible application policy model for automating the visibility, hardware acceleration, and other functions and services needed to make data center infrastructure support applications faster.

This unique new model is designed to accelerate application deployment from months to minutes.  It allows the network to rapidly respond to the needs of applications while delivering up to 75 percent TCO savings compared to merchant silicon-based competitor switches and software-only network virtualization solutions. Together, Cisco is collaborating with this ecosystem of industry leaders to help stimulate technology innovation, enhance the value of businesses’ existing IT assets, and accelerate market adoption of ACI by delivering greater business agility for customers.

Industry Perspective on Application Centric Infrastructure

• Delivering the First and Best Application-Centric Infrastructure on Vblock Systems
  Trey Layton, chief technology officer, VCE

• Putting Protection at the Heart of Infrastructure Automation
  Steve Bennett, president and chief executive officer, Symantec

• Cisco is bringing the Network to the Application – what does that mean in Machine Data terms?
  Hal Rottenberg, practice manager, Datacenter Infrastructure, Splunk

• Delivering OpenStack Innovation Through Collaboration: Red Hat and Cisco
  Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat

• Offspring of a Common Vision:  Clustered Data ONTAP and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure
  Jay Kidd, chief technology officer, NetApp

• Microsoft and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure, hello cloud!
  Satya Nadella, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft

• Application-Centric from Top to Bottom and End to End:  F5 and Cisco
  Lori MacVittie, senior product manager, Emerging Technologies, F5

• Propelling Applications Forward with Network Visibility and Agility
  Rick Trujilio, product marketing manager, Emulex

• EMC + Cisco Lock Arms to Deliver Next Generation Data Center
  EMC Pulse Blog

• When Applications and Networks Unite – The Age of Enlightened Infrastructure
  Abishek Chauhan, CTO, NetScaler Product Group, Citrix

• Dawn of Application Centric Infrastructure for Cloud and Big Data
  Andi Mann, vice president, Strategic Solutions, CA Technologies

Partner Executive Quotes: 

Gordon Payne, senior vice president, Solutions, Citrix
“We’re excited about the application-centric approach that Cisco is bringing to data center infrastructure. By tailoring for applications, future joint solutions will allow our customers to deliver cloud services more efficiently and effectively than ever. Citrix and Cisco product development teams are working closely together to deliver tight integration of Citrix NetScaler with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure for centralized management and improved security. With this, our mutual customers will be able to migrate smoothly with the current Citrix NetScaler integrated with Cisco Nexus into this new fabric-based approach while protecting the majority of their current investments and operational processes.”

Jeremy Burton, executive vice president, Product Operations, Solutions & Marketing, EMC Corporation
“Infrastructure only exists to serve the needs of business applications. IT must transform their infrastructure so it can dynamically adapt to the changing needs of diverse application workloads. By integrating Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure with EMC’s best-of-breed storage infrastructure our mutual customers will have the ability to define application service levels, automatically provision the right infrastructure and monitor system execution in a simple, cost-effective way.”

John McAdam, chief executive officer, F5 Networks
“Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure approach provides our joint customers with greater IT agility and data center automation. The application policy model is aligned with our customers’ business objectives and with F5’s approach towards both application-aware networking and open, programmable fabrics. By integrating F5 Synthesis into the Cisco ACI fabric, we could support accelerated application deployment and enhanced visibility with best-in-class application delivery services for both physical and virtual applications.”

Deepak Advani, general manager, Cloud & Smarter Infrastructure, IBM
“With our long-term relationship with Cisco, IBM demonstrates our commitment to offer market leading Tivoli Netcool network management and Application Performance Management capabilities that support the latest networking technologies. IBM welcomes Cisco’s intent to provide plugin support for OpenStack and collaborate on OASIS TOSCA application orchestration standards, which confirms IBM’s approach with SmartCloud Orchestrator for application deployment. This ongoing collaboration will allow our joint clients to be confident that their applications will be optimized and managed by IBM’s Management products in conjunction with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure.”

Satya Nadella, executive vice president, Enterprise and Cloud, Microsoft
“Microsoft is committed to helping customers realize cloud computing benefits through our Cloud OS – a consistent platform spanning private clouds, service provider clouds and Windows Azure. We’re excited to partner with Cisco to bring together our Cloud OS and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure framework to deliver new integrated networking solutions that allow our customers to take the next step on their cloud computing journey, whether in their datacenters or as part of hybrid clouds.”

Tom Georgens, president and chief executive office, NetApp
“For more than a decade, NetApp and Cisco have partnered on solutions that have defined the future of the data center. NetApp brings the power of Data ONTAP to help organizations dramatically simplify storage management for an application centric infrastructure. Together, Cisco and NetApp will work to allow companies to deliver applications to end-users where they want, when they want, and to any device – securely, rapidly, and at a lower cost.”

Dr. Vishal Sikka, member SAP AG Executive Board and Global Managing Board
“We are really excited to work with Cisco on ACI, and bring the full potential of SAP HANA, and applications built on HANA – whether they are traditional applications or completely new, transformative applications – to take advantage of Application Centric Infrastructure and bring the full potential of real-time business to our customers.”

Steve Bennett, president and chief executive officer, Symantec
“Cisco’s application-centric approach represents a big step forward for our industry, enabling IT to automate provisioning of applications down to the network layer and monitor the health of those applications from the infrastructure up – all through a single pane of glass. At Symantec, we’re driven by a simple vision: free and safe flow of information that drives people, businesses, and governments forward. Our deep expertise and range of solutions will protect customers’ information wherever it resides, in the data center or in the cloud. Together, Symantec and Cisco can deliver a more secure, compliant and highly available infrastructure for applications and information.”

Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat
“The pace of technology innovation has necessitated a new vision for IT and with its Application Centric Infrastructure, Cisco is introducing that vision. We plan to extend Cisco’s ACI common application policy framework to Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, helping customers to build rich, application-driven network policies in their cloud environments. Red Hat is proud to partner with Cisco to deliver intelligent cloud infrastructure with our OpenStack-powered open hybrid cloud solutions.”

Praveen Akkiraju, chief executive officer, VCE
“As the market leader in converged infrastructure systems, VCE has excelled at dramatically simplifying the deployment of next-generation data center infrastructure for our customers. Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure with VCE Vblock Systems can deliver an elastic, application-aware solution that allows customers to adapt dynamically to business requirements and provide a unified operational model across physical and virtual infrastructure. VCE’s unique capabilities will help minimize the risk of adopting Cisco’s ACI-enabled platform and accelerate the deployment of this exciting new data center building block.”

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure
• Read blog by Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers
• Learn more about Cisco data center solutions
• Read: Cisco Data Center blog

About Cisco
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