Cisco and Hitachi Vantara share many customers with data center modernization initiatives. With this in common, earlier this year the two companies collaborated to deliver new validated solutions that are helping enterprise businesses meet the challenges of today, and position themselves for the future.

The new Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure combines the power of Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus switches with Hitachi Vantara virtual storage platforms (VSP). This joint solution not only brings together our compute, network, and storage products, it also includes management automation and analytics capabilities that can simplify operations, diagnose problems, and offer remedies before they affect your users.

Recently, the two companies partnered on a second major release of the architecture that has been re-tooled to use the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) as a comprehensive SDN solution. This architecture is composed of the Hitachi VSP connecting through the Cisco MDS multilayer switches to Cisco UCS, and further enabled with the Cisco Nexus family of switches, which implement ACI.

Adaptive Solutions with ACI

Cisco designed ACI fabric so that it directly addresses the trends your team deals with every day: automating management, making policies programmatic, and dynamically provisioning workloads. It accomplishes this by combining hardware, policy-based control systems, and closely coupled software to provide advantages not possible in other architectures.

With ACI, Adaptive Solutions are powered to deliver a resilient fabric to satisfy today's dynamic applications that are moving your business forward. ACI leverages a network fabric that employs industry proven protocols coupled with innovative technologies to create a flexible, scalable, and highly available architecture of low-latency, high-bandwidth links. This fabric delivers application instantiations using profiles that house the requisite characteristics to enable the end-to-end connectivity that is required in today's environments.

This Cisco and Hitachi ACI design consists of Cisco Nexus 9500 and 9300-based spine/leaf switching architecture controlled using a cluster of three Application Policy Infrastructure Controllers (APICs). With the Nexus switches in place, the platform delivers an intelligently designed, high port density, low latency network, supporting up to 100G connectivity.

Cisco ACI delivers software flexibility with the scalability of hardware performance. Moreover, it adds additional business benefits to the Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure.

Benefits

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure is the industry's most secure, open, and comprehensive Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution. It radically simplifies, automates, and provides secure infrastructure deployment and governance, while expediting the application deployment lifecycle, allowing organizations to:

• Automate for scale. Achieve automation through common policy for data center operations.
• Accelerate to multicloud. Extend consistent policies across multiple on-premises and cloud instances.
• Network protection. Pervasive security aids business continuity, resiliency improves failure avoidance, and centralized control and configuration aids in disaster recovery.
• Assurance and insights. Transform operations in data center networks to a fundamentally more proactive model and automate troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and remediation

To discover the full benefits of ACI, check out the Solutions Overview.

At the end of the day, modernizing the data center can be overwhelming for organizations, so it's vital to select a trusted technology partner with proven expertise. With Cisco and Hitachi as partners, companies can build for the future by enhancing systems of record, supporting systems of innovation, and growing their businesses -and now with Cisco ACI, they can take a major step forward in managing complexity, maximizing business benefits, and deploying workloads in any location and on any cloud.

Need more information?

Read the latest on CVD with ACI

Check out the Deployment guide

Learn more about the Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solution for Converged Infrastructure

for more information around why to choose ACI.