At Gartner's Data Center Conference this year, everyone is talking about how Data Centers are evolving to meet the needs of mobile, social, Big Data, and cloud native applications. The Data Center, People, and Processes are the focus as IT organizations look at supporting their traditional core enterprise applications (Mode 1) and new cloud native (Mode 2) applications to become Digital Enterprises.  The organization transformation most often mentioned has been the integration of Development and Operations -creating DevOps processes, culture, and teams.

Applications, cloud, and security management stacks and architectures must evolve as well to support the needs of these distributed applications in distributed data centers.

Microsegmentation

To support cloud native and multi-tier applications, Cisco ACI takes an elegant approach to provide fine grained security with microsegmentation which uses policy-based automation for  enhanced security for east-west traffic within the data center. Its true value lies in its integration with application design and holistic network policy, and it interoperates transparently with a wide variety of hypervisor switches (VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS), Microsoft Hyper-V virtual switch), bare-metal servers, L4-L7 devices, and orchestration platforms. Microsegmentation provides internal control of traffic within the data center and can greatly enhance a data center's security posture. Cisco ACI is the only solution available today that enables true microsegmentation with the performance, scalability, and visibility that modern applications demand.

Application Leaders Embrace ACI

New ACI Ecosystem partners using the northbound open APIs of the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller in ACI allow the automation of entire application suites, Software-as-a-Service, and Platform-as-a-Service for application development teams creating applications to engage with their enterprise's customers in new and valuable ways. These partners integrate or monitor applications, cloud management platforms, security and application policy across compute, network, and storage infrastructure for distributed applications.  Hear from some of these leaders directly in the video here.

• Apprenda uses ACI to provide security, agility, and visibility for its PaaS platform to deliver a policy based secure PaaS. Consumer facing applications need to have strong isolation from each other, and that isolation cannot be a slow (manual) DevOps process. Cisco ACI endpoint groups and microsegments provide the type of automation and dynamic isolation needed for applications with high risk profiles hosted on Apprenda.
• CliQr CloudCenter and Cisco ACI produces a true application-defined management platform for users to model, migrate, and manage the entire lifecycle of new and existing applications-along with its full complement of required resources-onto any cloud or datacenter environment. With a joint integrated solution, customers are able to realize new levels of efficiency and security, with complete application isolation and true microsegmentation.
• DataTorrent Real Time Streaming for Big Data analytics and Cisco ACI enables customers to automate and secure access to external data sources outside the Hadoop cluster in a dynamic way while meeting regulatory and compliance security requirements.
• KillerIT integrates with Cisco ACI to map application dependencies to associated infrastructure and automatically create application network profiles and policies.
• One Convergence Network Service Delivery (NSD) and Cisco ACI allows for high level of automation of all layers of the networking stack and enables enterprises and service providers to roll out a rich set of network services at scale in OpenStack cloud deployments. The solution uses a common policy model, which is a community driven standard in OpenStack called GBP, to automate all the layers of infrastructure networking in OpenStack.
• ScienceLogic delivers Automatic Dependency Mapping of Cisco ACI and the IT elements that use it. ScienceLogic's hybrid IT monitoring platform automatically discovers all of the elements making up your Cisco ACI system including spines, leafs, APICs, tenants, applications, EPGs, bridge domains, contracts, etc. and simplifies the operations of application troubleshooting and performance optimization.
• Vnomic, SAP and Cisco are collaborating to dramatically accelerate and simplify the deployment and operation of large-scale SAP applications by using Cisco ACI.  The policy driven infrastructure solution enables SAP HANA and HANA VORA to shared resources as a unified cluster for Bimodal IT.

These northbound APIC integration partners are bringing application management and monitoring capabilities across compute, network, and storage to help application developers and IT managers to simplify operations, deliver more agile, programmable infrastructure-as-a-service, and with greater security from threats within the Data Center.

For More Information on Microsegmentation:

ACI Microsegmentation Overview (New)

An Overview of Network Security Considerations for Cisco ACI Deployments

New Innovations for L4-7 Network Services Integration with Cisco's ACI Approach

Microsegmentation: Enhancing Security and Operational Simplicity with Cisco ACI

For More Information on Automating Application Suites, PaaS:

Application Leaders Embrace ACI

Apprenda -secure PaaS with Cisco ACI

CliQr CloudCenter and Cisco ACI Simplify Application Deployment Lifecycle

DataTorrent -Cisco ACI and Secure Big Data

KillerIT -Automatic Policy Creation and Cisco ACI

One Convergence -OpenStack Network Service Delivery for Cisco ACI

ScienceLogic -Visualization and Application Dependency Maps for Cisco ACI

Vnomic -Policy Driven Software Defined Everything and Cisco ACI