Cisco ACI Anywhere
The data center is no longer a place or a fixed location but instead is defined as wherever the data is created, processed, and used. Cisco ACI Anywhere is a marketing term highlighting unique innovations ACI has gone through to meet customers’ different deployment needs: on-premises, remote and satellite locations, bare-metal providers, colocation environments, and public cloud. This term encompasses a host of solutions, including ACI MultiPod, ACI Multi-Site, ACI Multicloud, Remote Leaf, vPod, various ACI integrations, and other future solutions yet to come. Together, ACI Anywhere solutions transform ACI into a true hybrid cloud solution. Cisco ACI Anywhere facilitates application agility and data center automation. It automates management of end-to-end connectivity and enforcement of consistent security policies for applications running throughout the edge-to-cloud continuum.
Figure 9-16 illustrates various ACI Anywhere solutions that facilitate the any workload, any location, any cloud strategy.
Figure 9-16 Cisco ACI Anywhere
In Chapter 8, “Describing Cisco ACI,” we discussed various Cisco ACI deployment models that make Cisco ACI Anywhere possible, including ACI MultiPod, Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, Cloud ACI, Remote Leaf, and so on. Here, we will discuss some of the popular integration solutions for Cisco ACI that are an integral part of Cisco ACI Anywhere.
Cisco ACI and Cisco SD-WAN integration
Cisco offers ACI and SD-WAN integration for branch offices (network edge). This is an integral component of customers’ cloud journey that requires secure, policy-driven interconnects between the data center and branch offices that are a cost-efficient alternative to provisioning dedicated connections. Through this integration, you can now automate a WAN path selection between the branch office and the on-premises data center based on application policy.
For example, traffic from a stock trader in a branch office in Chicago can be automatically sent over the fastest possible WAN link to access the trading application hosted in a data center in Germany, based on the application policies and SLAs configured.
Figure 9-17 illustrates Cisco ACI to Cisco SD-WAN integration.
