Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.
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Cradlepoint NetCloud Engine
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Cradlepoint in Boise offers the all-inclusive NetCloud Solution Packages for branch, mobile, and IoT networks combine tailored NetCloud services with fit-for-purpose hardware and a comprehensive support plan. NetCloud Solution Packages are cloud-managed and deployable anywhere in days, not months. Cradlepoint acquired the NetCloud technology with original developer Pertino in December 2015, and integrated the platform into their own services by early 2016.
I feel that Cisco ACI is quite good at different architecture designs. You can have it as just a straight layer two network. You can have it like we have with a vast layer three network and I think just for the layer three network it has easen up the use. I think the use cases for layer three networking is better for ACI. If you just want to do the layer two, you can still use Cisco Nexus and so on and that should be almost simpler in some way.
I have yet to have any situation where Cradlepoint NetCloud Engine was "less appropirate". It's easy to use and understand and extremely effective for deploying Cradlepoints and maintaining them. The control over the Cradlepoint devices is remarkable, absolute and the product is very well suited and feature rich for the task,
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.
I think something I've just went to a session with hyper fabric and the ideas that hyper fabric has. Keep it really simple because Cisco ACI is a complex system and adopt some of the ideas behind hyper fabric, bring it to ACI that will be really beneficial. So as I said, automation is a great thing, but it's still, you need to have the background and the really complex stuff that happens behind the scenes to leverage the value of that solution. And by adding more simplicity to it, I think that will be a great thing. And also integrating with other applications in terms of the automation.
Cradlepoint NetCloud virtual backplane bandwidth is improving but could limit some very large enterprise customers without creative network segmentation.
Further improvements to simplify NetCloud Manager use would be appreciated.
User license management and compliance tools need to be clarified and simplified.
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.
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)
Device management is nearly the same as if you logged in locally, giving a familiar feel to the interface. Device group management can be cumbersome when pushing firmware updates.
It allways works. If there are problems with links going down by accident (say someone accidentally unpatches something they shouldn't have), we rarely miss more then one packet over the link. Also, using VPCs we are able to upgrade the software on the switches without the attached EPs ever noticing.
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.
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
Every time I have engaged support, it has been a satisfying experience. Because they cover such a wide range of applications, I do have to spend more time explaining our intended results and rationale than I would have to do with a more focused vendor, but it's a minor tradeoff for the value of saved time in every other aspect of the solution.
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.
Being involved in the implmentation gives you more overview on how things are supposed to be working and communicating, you can easily performce troubleshooting and understanding the troubleshooting scenario
It is much easier to group your devices within NetCloud prior to deployment. We ran into issues of lost/changed settings when grouping devices that had already been deployed
I've used the Cisco Wireless LAN Controller 9800. I was quite surprised. It was very good to manage access points in a campus network setup that was good. There's a Cisco SD Access solution that I use. I forgot the name of it, to manage also the campus. It was also good. Yeah, I've used quite some Cisco product, but the one I can remember was the Cisco Wireless LAN Controller 9800.
Before Cradlepoint NetCloud, firewall transversal was a challenge for telemedicine and required extensive and lengthy cooperation with client IT professionals. Interface selection and failover required application-level software on the host that would become inaccessible should a failover event go badly. We used several tools, each with their own management consoles, licensing plans, and learning curves to enable solutions. Much of that is a thing of the past with NetCloud.
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.
We've definitely spent quite a bit of time relearning how to do things in ACI, but I think the investment has been well worth while considering that we can now deploy tenants and leaves from the ground up in a matter of seconds.
We can if we choose to upgrade an entire datacenters worth of switches in a single night. (We've chosen to break it up for availability requirements, but if you didn't require 99.999% uptime like us you may be able to do it)
