Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) in the data center is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. Cisco ACI 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 is designed from the foundation to support emerging industry demands while maintaining a migration path for architecture already in place. The fabric is designed to support the industry move to management automation programmatic policy and dynamic "workload-anywhere" models. The Cisco ACI fabric accomplishes this with a combination of hardware policy-based control systems and software closely coupled to provide advantages not possible in other models.

The Cisco ACI fabric consists of three major components:

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

These three components handle both the application of network policy and the delivery of packets. Cisco Nexus® 9000 Series Switches support Cisco ACI and organizations can use them as spine or leaf switches to take full advantage of an automated policy-based systems management approach.

The Cisco Nexus 9300 platform leaf switches for Cisco ACI are fixed-port switches designed for top-of-rack (ToR) and middle-of-row (MoR) deployment in data centers that support enterprise applications service provider hosting and cloud computing environments. These Layer 2 and 3 nonblocking switches support 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) with up to 2.56 terabits per second (Tbps) of internal bandwidth.