Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) is an innovative architecture that radically simplifies optimizes and accelerates the entire application deployment lifecycle.

Cisco ACI uses a holistic systems-based approach with tight integration between physical and virtual elements an open ecosystem model and innovation-spanning application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) hardware and software. This unique approach uses a common policy-based operating model across a network that supports Cisco ACI along with security elements (and computing and storage in the future) eliminating IT silos and drastically reducing cost and complexity.

The main benefits of Cisco ACI include:

• Simplified automation with an application-based policy model
• Common platform for managing physical virtual and cloud-based environments
• Centralized visibility with real-time application health monitoring
• Operation simplicity with common policy management and operation models across application network and security resources (and computing and storage resources in the future)
• Open software flexibility for development and operations (DevOps) teams and ecosystem partner integration
• Scalable performance and secure multitenancy