The Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™ solution in the data center is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. The Cisco ACI solution provides a robust transport network for today's dynamic workloads. Cisco ACI is built on a network fabric that combines time-tested protocols with new innovations to create a highly flexible scalable and resilient architecture of low-latency high-bandwidth links. This fabric delivers a network that can support the most demanding and flexible data center environments.

The Cisco ACI fabric consists of three major components:

• Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)
• Spine switches
• Leaf switches

Building on the success of first-generation Cisco Nexus® 9300 platform switches the latest Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platforms can collect comprehensive Cisco Tetration Analytics™ telemetry information at line rate across all ports without adding any latency to the packets or negatively affecting switch performance. This telemetry information is exported every 100 milliseconds (ms) by default directly from the switch's application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This information consists of three types of data:

• Flow information: This information contains information about endpoints protocols ports when the flow started how long the flow was active etc.
• Interpacket variation: This information captures any interpacket variations within the flow. Examples include variation in time to live (TTL) IP and TCP flags payload length etc.
• Context details: Context information is derived outside the packet header including variation in buffer utilization packet drops within a flow association with tunnel endpoints etc.