Cisco ACI Reviews

We use this solution in our data centers. It is for connecting servers and increasing our bandwidth and resiliency.

Historically, we had four different computer rooms, and they were all configured differently.  When we went through the refresh and started using ACI, it was the first time that we had a consistent setup in all of our computer rooms.

The most valuable features are the ease of setup for redundancy, as well as centralized control.

The ability for us to figure out the traffic flows, to enable some of the more segmentation parts of it, is really tough with what is built into ACI. It would be nice if it were part of it.

The stability of this solution is great. We love it.

We have not hit the limit, so it's been very scalable for us. Redundancy has been great.

We hired an employee who used to work for Cisco technical support, and this person has been much more useful than the Cisco tech, itself. Technical support has not always been what we had hoped for.

However, we've had a lot of on-site support with our advanced services, and they've been great.

We work on state budget cycles, and several years went by without any kind of refresh. What we had were disparate solutions that were failing, and didn't have the same kind of redundancy or configuration. As such, the users were having a terrible experience so we had to do something. We then looked at ACI and Cisco and positioned it such that it made a lot of sense for us.

The initial setup of this solution is pretty straightforward.

We implemented this solution in-house.

We considered Cisco, Juniper, and VMware. Cisco rose to the top because of the support. It wasn't just the sale; they were going to be around afterward. We have a relationship there, that we trust.

Cisco is there for the long haul. It's been built by network people who understand the resiliency needs for network infrastructure. It's been reliable for us, as well as scalable. It can do our one-gig, ten-gig, forty-gig, hundred-gig, it can do it all, no matter if it's legacy or new.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Cisco ACI is primarily used for automation of the data center networking environment.

Cisco ACI's best features include its network-centric approach and micro-segmentation.

Cisco ACI would be improved by providing a cloud offering; otherwise, it risks becoming a niche product.

I've been working with Cisco ACI since 2017.

Cisco ACI has matured and is a very stable product.

Cisco ACI is scalable.

Cisco's technical support is very responsive and quick to resolve issues.

Positive

The setup can be complex if you take an application-centric approach, but a network-centric approach is relatively straightforward.

Cisco's pricing is very expensive.

I'd give Cisco ACI a rating of eight out of ten.

The solution helps with business continuity.

Centralized management is valuable. PBR has been beneficial for network efficiency. It helps redirect the traffic to a node that is not necessarily a gateway.

The GUI is not easy to use. It must be made simple and convenient to use.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

I have not faced any issues with performance or stability.

The tool is scalable. It can adapt to the growing needs of the business.

We contact the support team when we face any issues.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment is centrally provisioned. The initial setup might take a couple of days. The deployment depends on the scale and customer requirements. We need one engineer for the deployment. The maintenance requires some skill development.

The product is not cheap. It is usually expensive. However, the solution’s local presence and technical support sometimes make customers prefer it.

We see tangible benefits of policy-driven automation in a modern scale environment where frequent changes are required. However, the features and benefits are almost negligible for a relatively smaller and static environment. The vendor's local presence and the support provided are the main reasons customers choose Cisco ACI. I will recommend the product to others. We must ensure that the use case is well-defined to get the benefit and ROI from the product. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is using the automation for deploying new applications in our data center.

It is now easier than before we had ACI to configure any new changes into our data center.

The centralized configuration is its most valuable feature.

The only drawback that we are seeing is the user interface is still a little complex and difficult to use. It needs a more user-friendly interface. I do not use it daily. Every time that I have to go back and configure something, it is very difficult and confusing to remember how to do it and where the menu are located.

The stability is good.

The scalability is good.

I have never had to open a technical support ticket.

The initial setup was complex, but that was not an issue for us. The complexity was around such a big change in architecture, as there were a lot of new topics to learn.

We used Cisco for the initial deployment. Our experience with them was very good. We have had someone on site regularly, which has been really helpful.

Cisco is the only company that we seriously considered.

Do not be afraid of the change that Cisco ACI requires. It takes some time to get used to it. However, in the end, it is worth it as the solution is simpler and more efficient.

Cisco ACI is used in the data center ecosystem. It's an eco-space solution. It's a DMB solution where you have the big hybrid data center you want to deploy on-premises, so the goal is to integrate all the virtual environments on feature environment servers with the data center.

What's most valuable in Cisco ACI is that it isn't like the legacy infrastructure where you have a lot of complexity in a TTR architecture.

What I like most about Cisco ACI is that you can control those devices from a single console, even if you have three hundred devices. You can manage the entire infrastructure from a single point of contact, so Cisco ACI is a time saver.

Another exclusive feature of Cisco ACI is its API interface that lets you enhance automation within the environment.

You can manage your entire data center from a single interface through Cisco ACI. If you want to upgrade three hundred devices in one click, you can do that, and within one hour, all three hundred devices will be upgraded.

I also like that Cisco keeps enhancing the product by adding different features, so there have been five major releases of Cisco ACI.

Another valuable feature of the solution is that it's more user-friendly than Aruba and Juniper.

An area for improvement in Cisco ACI is security, which Cisco needs to enhance in the solution. Though Cisco ACI uses a whitelist model, you must purchase an external product, such as a security firewall solution, to make whitelisting work, which the customer could find expensive.

For example, you're a customer who has Cisco ACI, and the solution doesn't have IP-based filtering, so as a customer, you've purchased Cisco ACI. However, you still need to buy another product for security, and some customers wouldn't like that. However, some customers prefer to go with Cisco ACI because of its scalability and flexibility versus other solutions such as Juniper and Aruba.

Technical support for Cisco ACI also needs improvement, particularly in product knowledge.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Cisco ACI is segment routing. For example, if you have an MPLS network, you can't directly integrate it with Cisco ACI at the moment. Suppose you have multiple data centers you want to connect to the MPLS private link through your service provider. In that case, you can't directly integrate that with Cisco ACI without an external device, which doesn't make sense to the customer. Cisco recently introduced the MPLS feature in Cisco ACI, but it's not up to the mark.

We've been involved with Cisco ACI since 2015, and have deployed the solution for more than thirty projects.

Cisco ACI used to be unstable, but after version 4.2, it's been very stable in the production environment.

Scalability-wise, Cisco ACI is a good solution because you can have more than five thousand servers in one ACI fabric. There's a lot of flexibility and scalability in Cisco ACI because you can even seamlessly integrate it with legacy infrastructure despite having a different data center.

Cisco support used to be good, but over time, many newbies were hired to provide technical support for Cisco ACI and other Cisco products, so the quality has decreased. The support provided before 2018 was good, but now, the Cisco technical support team has been struggling to give good support or provide expertise in some areas.

For example, if you raise an issue, you have to ask multiple engineers and make numerous escalations. Cisco ACI is a good product, but the support quality nowadays isn't up to the mark.

Cisco requires the customer to have some experience with the product before deployment, but novice technical support is brought in without sufficient training or without training the newbies for at least six months. The technical support team seems to just select cases and works on those without enough knowledge, so the customer experience is bad.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating Cisco support a three.

Some customers used Juniper and Aruba but went with Cisco ACI because the other two solutions weren't as user-friendly.

Anyone setting up Cisco ACI for the first time will see that it requires a lot of resources. Still, even if the initial setup is complicated, you can refer to the Cisco website regarding the steps you need to perform to complete the setup. Cisco explained the process well, and you can even take a workshop on it.

From a configuration point of view, I found Cisco ACI complex because it isn't easy to create the policy. Unless you have a good networking background, you won't be able to set up Cisco ACI easily.

For example, if your organization doesn't have experienced engineers, Cisco provides a two-day workshop for your engineers. Cisco also offers many free tools in the market to help you set up your account.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating the initial setup for Cisco ACI as four.

Pricing for Cisco ACI could be expensive if you're not a gold partner. If you're a gold partner, you'll get reasonable pricing, but to become a gold partner, you must cross several layers. For example, at least twenty engineers within your organization have to be certified, with each certification priced at £2,000 minimum, so this would make some companies think twice about the product. If you're going for Aruba and Juniper products, on the other hand, you can quickly get the partner status, and you can start selling the product.

As a gold partner, you can get up to seventy percent discount on Cisco ACI, for example, while an ordinary partner gets ten percent off.

Cisco ACI is expensive for both customers and partners, but I'm rating pricing for the product as four out of five because even if the price is costly, you get a lot of benefits from the product.

Cisco ACI isn't the best, price-wise, but it's still a good solution. If you're in a small organization, you may be unable to afford it. Cisco ACI is best for enterprises but not SMBs because Cisco ACI and its required resources are expensive.

I've evaluated VMware NSX, but it can't compete with Cisco ACI. Cisco ACI is a hardware-level product that can support terabytes and petabytes of data at the same time, which VMware NSX can't do because it's a virtual environment with limited throughput and scalability.

If you're planning to apply terabytes of traffic in VMware NSX, you'll find it hard, and the solution will eventually choke after some time.

Cisco ACI has the best scalability. Cisco also has categories where particular hardware will be recommended based on your requirement, for example, whether you have petabytes or terabytes of data.

My company is mainly involved with three products, Cisco ACI, Cisco FTD, and Cisco WebDialer.

My company is a reseller/integrator for Cisco ACI.

I'd rate Cisco ACI as nine out of ten.

We are switching the Nexus line to ACI for our customer: the server, firewall, etc.

We will improve our organization using the automation.

• Its resilience
• It easy to configure.

They need more documentation. Because when we hit an issue and searched on Google, we didn't find a lot of documents about the issue. Possibly because it's a new product.

We are deploying ACI, and at same time, we are testing migration from our old network. Our old next is Nexus, latest version, and we have a less load balancing and it's hard to migrate. We are hitting some issues, so maybe there is room for improvement.

It is to early to evaluate the stability.

The scalability is okay. We are deploying the leaf switches one-to-one.

The technical support is okay. We have been looking into some issues with our legacy network when migrating our ACI. While the tech support has responded well, we are still waiting for some more information.

We were having some issues with our network, so we took some advice from Cisco regarding that product, and looked for another product to replace it.

We deployed a lot of Fabrics to multiple sites, which was a bit complex.

We only worked directly with Cisco's IT, and they provide some consultants onsite to help us.

Cisco ACI is a good solution, but Cisco needs to test all the networks before doing a migration.

We deploy Cisco ACI within our customer's data centers, providing them with the capability to configure the software-defined network as per their defined requirements. This solution empowers customers to centrally monitor and control the network without the need for individual edge management. Moreover, it offers scalability, allowing for easy expansion in the future.

The flexibility of adding new components with minimal impact on existing services running in the data center is a key benefit of this ACI-based solution. Customers appreciate the unified control and management provided by ACI, allowing them to oversee the entire data center centrally. This solution facilitates seamless communication between various services and ensures future scalability with minimal configurations and operational effort. The cost savings for customers are notable, particularly in instances where adding ports or making operational adjustments is a straightforward process, requiring minimal resources. ACI stands out as a state-of-the-art, high-performance, and highly scalable solution.

Its scalability and reliability capabilities should be enhanced.

We have been working with it for approximately eight years.

Occasionally, we encounter the need to reset certain programs due to bugs within one of the implemented data features. This requires performing upgrades approximately every six months to address and resolve these issues. I would rate its stability capability eight out of ten.

While I acknowledge that the solution is scalable, there are occasional bugs and the need for upgrades or adjustments approximately every five years. We operate on multiple levels, with small, medium, and high scalability organizations. Typically, we opt for the highest scalable level during our implementations. I would rate its scalability at seven out of ten.

I would rate its customer service and support nine out of ten.

Positive

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

We use Cisco ACI for perimeter security and threat detection. 

The tool's initial deployment is complex and takes five hours to complete. 

I have been working with the solution for six to seven years. 

I rate the product's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten. My company has around 150 users for the solution. 

The deployment took less than one week to complete. 

A partner helped us with Cisco ACI's implementation. 

The tool is easy to handle once deployed. I rate it an eight out of ten.