Cisco looks to bring ACI to three major cloud vendors with initial field tests
Cisco recently announced it will commence early field trials for its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Virtual Edge. The news follows in the foot trails of the company announcing it intends to bring ACI to three major cloud vendors: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
Frank Palumbo, SVP global data center and enterprise networking sales for Cisco, confirmed the trials in a company blog post. “We are on schedule to ship by the end of this year,” he wrote. “The ACI Virtual Edge is hypervisor independent, offering consistent policy control across multiple hypervisors, with our initial version targeted for VMware ESXi.”
ACI is a software-defined networking (SDN) solution intended to reduce data center complexity by combining hardware and software capabilities in a single environment. The company claims a 38% growth in its data center ACI platform.
By bringing ACI to major public cloud vendors, Cisco customers will be able to run applications on both private and public clouds. Companies that use ACI can apply network policies to infrastructure hardware in data centers, virtual machines and load balancers assisting cloud applications. An estimated 4,000 Cisco customers currently use the ACI platform.
Cisco has been attempting to rebrand itself as a software-based vendor as routers and switches based on proprietary hardware go out of style. The company recently posted a 9% year-over-year decrease in its main switching and routing platforms, which constitutes nearly half of Cisco’s revenue. Regardless, whenever an organization transitions to a subscription model, drawbacks to initial revenues are to be expected. Cisco remains in the early stage of this transition.
Moreover, the benefits attached to Cisco’s ACI remain unclear since they were not specified following the announcement. In addition, Cisco did not highlight a timeframe within which ACI will be made available to public clouds. However, the initial field trials suggest Cisco wants to make ACI available to public clouds as soon as possible.
In the meantime, businesses are able to directly experience hybrid cloud technologies with competitors like VMware. In wake of a collaboration announced in 2016, businesses are able to support virtualized infrastructures fueled by VMware in Amazon and data centers.
