- Cisco have announced their Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) initiative. Over at the Cisco Data Center and Cloud blog they have a post that details where it fits into their overall strategy.
- Still at the Data Center and Cloud blog there is another post that details some of the partners that Cisco have lined up for ACI. I’m guessing these are all companies that don’t compete with Cisco directly (e.g. now that ACE is dead f5 are free to partner).
- Speaking of f5, as part of ACI they’ve announced support or compatibility between it and the f5 Synthesis “SDAS” architecture. Thankfully there is some kind of “detail” in the form of a solution overview. I really want to start seeing more technical detail though, but I have a feeling this is all way to new and it just doesn’t exist.
- For a bit of outside perspective, SDN Central have been covering the announcement and have an article, “Is Cisco’s SND Architecture Really That Special?“. It is always good to hear outside the echo chamber.
- Thankfully SDN Central again rides to the rescue with some more background and detail on Insieme/Nexus 9k. This looks to be another one of those attempts by Cisco to short-circuit their seemingly bizarre internal politics where each BU have their knives out for the competition and each other. I wonder how many more of these spin-ins Cisco can really do before customers start questioning all the new non-compatible architectures that each one brings.