When it comes to the data center, Cisco has countless solutions,
both hardware and software.
We'll focus on four products in this clip.
First, we have the Unified Computing System, or UCS Manager.
This product is designed for managing Cisco computing hardware,
such as rack and blade servers, inside of a private data center.
It can also manage Cisco's popular hyperconverge solution, known as HyperFlex.
The product enables administrators to apply server
policies in a centralized way.
UCS Manager has an RPC‑based XML API that describes methods
for programmers to interact with the system.
Cisco Intersight is a cloud‑based Software as a Service
offering for Cisco compute management.
Like Meraki, it comes with built‑in high availability and unlimited scale.
Intersight can also leverage information from other customers.
For example,
if another company uses Intersight and their data center crashes due to a bug,
Intersight can notify all other tenants,
such as Globomantics.
Sometimes, it can even take proactive action to remediate these faults.
Intersight supports a modern REST API for programmatic access.
UCS Director has a somewhat misleading name because it does much
more than just manage Cisco UCS platforms.
It's comparable to DNA Center except focused on the data center.
It can interact with many other vendors,
such as F5 load balancers, VMware vCenter,
NetApp storage appliances, and many more.
It is excellent for initial provisioning of new services,
as well as workflow orchestration.
Last, UCS Director has a REST API with extensive documentation.
Another popular Cisco data center product is application‑centric infrastructure,
or ACI.
ACI is somewhat similar to SD‑WAN in that it manages an entire collection
of network devices as a single application‑aware fabric.
ACI is based on the Cisco Nexus 9000 hardware platform,
a data center networking device.
Here's a sample connectivity diagram of how they might be interconnected.
If you remember the SD‑WAN vSmart controllers,
ACI uses an application policy infrastructure controller,
or APIC, which serves a similar purpose.
It communicates to all the network devices in the fabric and controls
how they forward traffic within the data center.
Imagine distributed applications that follow the MVC design
pattern discussed in the previous course.
Large‑scale apps would probably have different components spread
across different racks that need to communicate.
ACI can enforce policies to ensure the view never talks
directly to the model or vice versa.
Additionally,
ACI can govern what traffic is allowed to enter and exit the data center at the
interconnect points with the rest of the enterprise network.
Users should be able to access applications,
but not manage the fabric directly,
as only the APIC administrator should be doing that.
Let's explore four big capabilities of ACI.
Centralized management is a recurring theme.
The industry is demanding solutions that have nice‑looking dashboards,
plus strong API support.
ACI has a REST API, which we'll be exploring in the next clip.
ACI introduces a number of new network concepts, but I'll explain two key ones.
An endpoint group, or EPG,
is a collection of hosts with similar security attributes.
A contract defines the communications that are allowed between two EPGs.
This is a segmentation technique to ensure EPGs
only exchange authorized traffic, improving the organization's security posture.
Initially, ACI was limited to a single data center,
but has since been expanded to reflect modern enterprise computing requirements.
ACI can be extended across multiple sites to enable
increased availability and resilience.
Much like SD‑WAN, the API fabric is plug‑and‑play.
The fabric can be physically interconnected with
the APIC hanging off at the edge.
The APIC will automatically begin discovering all nodes in the fabric.
Once complete, the APIC will manage the fabric, allowing administrators to configure application‑specific policies.