Cisco has extended the reach of its Application Centric Interface (ACI) technology to the cloud, announcing availability both on Microsoft Azure and the Amazon Web services platforms.
The announcement was part of the company’s data center anywhere strategy, and took place at Cisco Live in Barcelona.
ACI Anywhere is designed to put ACI on any workload and cloud, across any location. The software-only Virtual ACI approach to networking also supports bare metal clouds and remote locations, enabling organizations to manage their cloud and hybrid environments.
Ronak Desai, the vice president of ACI engineering at Cisco outlined this latest unveiling:
“ACI Anywhere enables automation, security, and intent-based networking to optimize data center operations, protect digital businesses, and accelerate our customers’ expansion into the multicloud. Once implemented, ACI Anywhere helps with network connectivity, application segmentation and compliance.”
Companies like Cisco, VMware, HPE and IBM have, in recent months, forging partnerships with hyperscale cloud providers like Azure and AWS to automate data center workloads in the cloud.
There, Cisco ACI competes with the VMware NSX solution.
VMware, obviously, is coming off a two-year partnership with AWS, announced last summer, that extended its previous relationship with the company. Both are in intense competition with the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
For Cisco, though, this development may have the broadest impact.
Connecting ACI to the two largest cloud providers, combined with the Cisco AppDynamics unit, allow the company to push for the management of everything from containers to hypervisors to applications under one banner.
This, it calls, ACI Anywhere.
And this, it hopes, will put up a fight against the Dell owned, VMware.
