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All of today’s computing trends place more demands on the network. Cloud, mobile, social media, big data, collaborative computing—they all generate more traffic, higher end-user expectations, more management, and security issues. To keep up with the demands, the network has to keep getting smarter.

For independent software vendors (ISVs), this situation creates an enormous opportunity. By building solutions that are network-aware and that take full advantage of Cisco® Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI), ISVs can create new competitive advantages.

Cisco ACI radically simplifies, optimizes, and accelerates the entire application deployment lifecycle. It is the primary delivery mechanism for the industry’s broadest approach to make networks open, programmable, and application-aware. By partnering with Cisco, ISVs can align themselves with the industry’s networking leader and gain access to a full range of Cisco ACI resources, including ACI platform interfaces and development kits, network controllers, open policy protocol OpFlex and more. In short, ISVs can build solutions that build their network capabilities—and their business.

Independent Software Vendors: Exploit the Opportunities of Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Partner with Cisco, build network-aware applications, and create new competitive advantages.

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Smarter Networks Require Smarter ApplicationsThe network must evolve quickly in response to new innovations, services, and capabilities, including:

• Cloud – Cloud computing continues to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36 percent1 through 2016, with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) projected to grow by 37 percent. And the cloud demands a network that is more scalable, flexible, and application-aware. Applications must be predictable and independent of network considerations if they are to be located in various locations.

• Rich data – Video, voice, and other integrated, data-intensive services create the need to support all forms of network traffic and optimize performance to meet service-level agreements (SLAs).

• Mobility – Wireless computing and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives are forcing the network to adapt to deliver new services with new performance and security considerations.

• Big data – Real-time data collection and storage is increasing scalability and quality-of- service (QoS) requirements.

• Internet of Everything (IoE) – Billions of interconnected devices exacerbate the demand for bandwidth and application-specific performance.

The result is a pressing need for change in these key areas:

• Smarter applications – If the enterprise application workload is going to make the transition to cloud-based IT, applications must run outside of the enterprise’s controlled data centers. That means the next-generation network must work in combination with a new breed of network-aware applications to improve security, performance, and availability—in addition to complying with regulations.

• Greater network agility – The network must make the transition to the virtualized enterprise and data center to take full advantage of the potential efficiency gains and consolidation opportunities.

• Easier management and lower network operational cost – With up to 75 percent of network costs still being spent on administration, managing the network must be more automated. For instance, automation with intelligent software can help enterprises connect devices to the network edge; operational automation can help IT efficiently complete moves, adds, and changes to cut costs.

1Source: 451 Research

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Delivering on the Demands: Cisco ACICurrent approaches will not suffice to meet the requirements detailed above. To address these, Cisco is delivering a new architectural and operational model, Cisco ACI.

• Cisco ACI is the industry’s leading initiative aimed at making networks open, programmable, and application-aware. It is cross-architectural and supports service provider, branch, campus, and data center deployments. It advocates open standards, open APIs, and open source for a variety of network deployment options, including software-defined network (SDN) models. It includes elements of orchestration, automation policy, and analytics to expose the value of networks.

• With ACI, applications propel networking behavior, not the other way around. Pre-defined application requirements and descriptions (policy templates) automate the provisioning of the network, application ser-vices, security policies, tenant subnets, and workload placement, which in turn helps reduce IT costs and errors while accelerating deployment and making the business more agile.

ACI focuses on simplicity without compromising on infrastructure scale, responsiveness, security, or end-to-end visibility, and helps cut across different technology and organizational silos—network, compute, storage, application, security, and cloud. And it embraces open APIs, open source, and open standards. Key characteristics of ACI include:

• Simplified automation by an application-driven policy model

• Centralized visibility with real-time, application health monitoring

• Open software flexibility for development and operations (DevOps) teams and ecosystem partner integration

• Scalable performance and multi-tenancy in hardware

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Elements of ACIThe ACI vision extends beyond the network to include other infrastructure elements such as compute and storage resources, while supporting an open ecosystem of technology and developer partners. It also goes beyond traditional SDN and overlay network virtualization models, with application centricity designed for next-generation data center and cloud requirements (see Figure 1). Specifically, the ACI Fabric incorporates the following elements:

• ACI-ready Nexus 9000 switches – Cisco has expended our Nexus® switching portfolio with Nexus 9000 Series Switches for traditional and ACI data center deployments. The Nexus 9000 Series offers modular and fixed 1/10/40 Gigabit Ethernet switch configurations that operate in compatibility mode with the current Cisco Nexus switches or in ACI mode to take full advantage of ACI’s application policy-driven services and infrastructure automation features.

Figure 1. The Cisco ACI Platform for ISVs

• Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) – The Cisco APIC is the unified point of automation and management for the ACI Fabric, policy programming, and health monitoring. It is a centralized clustered controller that optimizes performance, supports any application anywhere, and unified operation of physical and virtual resources. The controller manages and operates a scalable and multi-tenant ACI fabric that spans physical and virtual elements. It is designed from its inception for programmability and centralized management, and it is responsible for everything from fabric bring-up and switch firmware to network policy configuring and instantiation (see Figure 2). Cisco currently offers two APIC options:

• Cisco APIC Controller debuted with the Nexus 9000 switching series and ACI Fabric strategy of Cisco acquisition Insieme Networks. It serves as a single point of automation and fabric element management for both physical and virtual environments, delivering the first data center and cloud solution that offers full visibility and integrated management of physical and virtual networked IT resources. In short, it gives data center and cloud operators looking to automate operations a way to spread workloads and associated traffic beyond the boundaries of a single data center.

• Cisco APIC Enterprise Module extends ACI solutions beyond the data center to campus WAN, branch and access networks. This allows IT organizations to automate network and policy configuration while managing applications across a wide range of networks and elimi-nate mundane operations so IT personnel can focus on more strate-gic work that will help grow the business. Simply put, it provides the unique ability to see the entire network as a single entity, instead of individual network elements, reducing complexity, accelerating appli-cation rollout across wired and wireless infrastructure, and improving the efficiency of network management and troubleshooting.

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Figure 2. Infrastructure Elements of Cisco APIC (Data Center Module)

• Application Network Profiles – An Application Network Profile within the fabric is a collection of the endpoint groups (a logical grouping of similar endpoints representing an application tier or set of services that require a similar policy), their connections, and the policies that define those connections. Application Network Profile is the logical representation of all components of the application and its interdependencies on the application fabric. Application Network Profiles are designed to be modeled in a logical way that matches the way that applications are designed and deployed. The configuration and enforcement of policies and connectivity are then handled by the system through the Cisco APIC rather than through an administrator.

• Partner Ecosystem – Cisco ACI is designed as an open architecture, which makes it both easy and advantageous for partners to add value and incorporate it into their business strategies. Currently more than 125 partners have aligned with the Cisco ACI vision, including BMC, Chef, Citrix, Computer Associates, EMC, IBM, NetApp, Puppet, Red Hat, SourceFire, Splunk, Symantec, VCE, and VMware. Cisco is providing training and other services to assist partners in working with ACI technology.

Cisco ACI: Benefits at a Glance

• Application velocity – any application, anywhere.

• Systems architecture that can enable a holistic view of applications, with centralized, application-level integrated visibility and real-time application health monitoring across physical and virtual environments.

• Common platform for managing physical, virtual, and cloud-based environments.

• Highly secure multi-tenancy with detailed control for applications and tenants.

• Scalable performance combining software flexibility and hardware performance.

• Superior application performance, improving application flow completion time by up to 80 percent.

• Operation simplicity, with common policy, management, and operation models across application, network, and security resources (and computing and storage resources in the future).

• Open APIs, open standards, and open source elements that can enable software flexibility for DevOps teams and ecosystem partner integration.

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ACI Benefits for DevelopersAs the pace of application development and deployment continues to accelerate, ACI becomes increasingly valuable to development teams that want to increase velocity and cut costs. For example, ACI offers:

• Simplicity and flexibility – With ACI, developers can utilize the tools they already use, such as Puppet and Chef, along with open source offerings, open APIs, partner tools and products, and more.

• Faster delivery equals more time to innovate – By integrating top solu-tions across multiple different partners and delivering on the promise of a more open ecosystem model, Cisco is helping developers to deliver on both the application and the infrastructure side faster than before while allowing them the bandwidth to innovate.

Cisco has also created a DevKit for Cisco ACI that will facilitate software developers’ efforts to create new network-aware applications that fully use the intelligence and sophisticated capabilities of ACI.

Cisco ACI Value to ISVsFor software vendor partners, Cisco ACI radically simplifies, optimizes, and accelerates the entire application deployment lifecycle. It dissolves IT siloes to simplify operations. It can enable applications to scale with optimized performance from small to massive data centers. It also helps to create a rich ecosystem of applications that can both gather network intelligence and control the network based on user and operations requirements.

For ISVs, this translates into new opportunities to:

• Add features and differentiation to existing applications and deploy them quickly, taking advantage of the ability to both talk to and listen to the network

• Create entirely new network-aware applications that can be consistently deployed and mobilized anywhere across physical and virtual environments and that automatically provide visibility into health and performance metrics

• Create optimized application networking protocols tailored to the needs of specific customers or industries. For example, create apps that already incorporate the recommended settings of key customers so they’re ready to run immediately—no customization is required.

• Give application owners and lines of business a whole new set of benefits:

• Dramatically reduce time to service delivery and time to revenue for business applications (from days to seconds)

• On-demand scale-out and tear-down lead to more predictable application and IT spending that is perfectly aligned to business activity

• On-premises or hybrid cloud deployment flexibility, without application modification and with consistent policies and quality of service to further optimize cost

• Visibility across physical and virtual infrastructure helps solve one of the biggest IT challenges—identifying the location and root cause of problems

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Americas HeadquartersCisco Systems, Inc.San Jose, CA

Asia Pacific HeadquartersCisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd.Singapore

Europe HeadquartersCisco Systems International BV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at www.cisco.com/go/offices.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does

not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)

Americas HeadquartersCisco Systems, Inc.San Jose, CA

Asia Pacific HeadquartersCisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd.Singapore

Europe HeadquartersCisco Systems International BV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at www.cisco.com/go/offices.

• Use ACI to simplify and orchestrate your own data center, so you can cut deployment costs and complexity by automating the environment.

• Take full advantage of Cisco ACI Services (such as Cisco Readiness Planning) to jumpstart your own ACI-based initiatives or your customers’.

• Gain access to new customers and market opportunities. Cisco already has more than 300 customers in the ACI pipeline, spanning every geography and every customer segment, according to Cisco senior executives. Just as with the ramp-up of the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®), Cisco is seeing the greatest early adoption in nimble mid-sized businesses, which are prime targets for ISVs. In short, everyone wants a piece of ACI, and that spells opportunity for our ISV partners.

The Cisco ACI also open doors to the broad range of resources and capabilities Cisco offers ISVs, including:

• Leadership – Cisco is a worldwide leader in networking, with a commitment to open networking, including open source, open standards, and open interfaces. Cisco has a dominant 70 to 80 percent market share in routers and switches, which translates into a US$180 billion installed base. ISVs can be confident that a Cisco ACI-enabled infrastructure will be deployed in their customers’ data centers.

• Innovation – ACI helps enable application-centric and intelligent networking by providing programmability in hardware, software, and ASICs.

• Ecosystem – Cisco partners, Cisco Services, and the Solution Partner Program (SPP) can help you design software-directed programmability into the overall solution.

• Cross-architectural solutions – Cisco offers holistic cross-architectural solutions that are highly secure and transcend branch-office, campus, data center, cloud, and service provider environments.

Get Started TodayThe first step toward a rewarding partnership with Cisco is to join the Solution Partner Program. Once you’ve joined SPP, you can quickly gain access to specific resources and sample core documentation. Join SPP today.

Also, join DevNet, the complete resource for everything developer at Cisco.