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Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) is the industry’s most secure, open, and
comprehensive Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution. It radically simplifies, optimizes, and
accelerates infrastructure deployment and governance and expedites the application deployment
lifecycle.
Cisco ACI implements Cisco’s intent-based networking framework. It captures higher-level business
and user intent in the form of a policy and converts this intent into the network constructs necessary
to dynamically provision the network, security, and infrastructure services. It uses a holistic systems-
based approach, with tight integration between hardware and software and physical and virtual
elements, an open ecosystem model, and innovative Cisco customer Application-Specific Integrated
Circuits (ASICs) to enable unique business value for modern data centers. This unique approach
uses a common policy-based operating model across the network, drastically reducing the cost and
complexity of operating your network.
Table 2 lists the specifications of the APIC appliance. Note that at least three appliances need to be
configured as a cluster.
Table 2. Cisco APIC appliance specifications
Cisco APIC appliance Cisco APIC appliance
Medium configuration: M2 Large configuration: L2
Default Default
Description units Description units
Power
supply 770W power supply 1 770W power supply 1
Physical dimensions (H
x W x D) 1 Rack Unit (1RU): 1.7 x 16.9 x 28.5 in. (4.32 x 43 x 72.4 cm)
Temperature:
Nonoperating –40 to 158°F (–40 to 70°C)
The Cisco APIC uses Cisco OpFlex, a southbound protocol in software-defined networking
(SDN), to enable policies to be applied across physical and virtual switches.
The OpFlex approach differs from the OpenFlow communications protocol, which is one of the
first and most widely deployed SDN standards, in that it focuses mainly on ensuring consistent
policy enforcement across the underlying infrastructure. While OpFlex centralizes policies,
OpenFlow looks to centralize all functions on the SDN Controller. OpFlex creators believe this
shift will allow the Controller to offer greater resiliency, availability, and scalability, by moving
some of the intelligence to hardware devices, using established network protocols.
With the Cisco APIC, northbound APIs allow for swift integration with existing management and
orchestration frameworks. It is also compatible with OpenStack, which is developing an open
cloud operating system to control the compute, storage and networking resources across the
organization. This provides consistency across physical, virtual, and cloud environments when
using the Cisco ACI policy. Southbound APIs enable users to extend the Cisco ACI policies to
existing virtualization and Layer 4-7 services, as well as networking components.
Cisco APIC