As the breadth and depth of the ACI solution continues to grow, so does customer interest.  Many customers who have invested in, and continue to invest in, the Nexus 2000-7000 switches find the ACI vision very compelling.  So, this leads to a logical question regarding how an existing Nexus 2000-7000 fabric will integrate with an ACI fabric.

In short, customers can leverage current Nexus products and add ACI capabilities to their data centers in an incremental manner.  Integrating ACI into an existing Nexus environment will not require replacement of existing Nexus switches.  The benefits of ACI policy can be extended to apps on both physical and virtual servers within the existing Nexus fabric.  This can be achieved as follows (double click on the graphic below to launch the 3+ minute presentation):

https://youtu.be/F3mmljpciL4

In this scenario, the existing Nexus fabric is serving as an optimized transport for an ACI overlay solution.  However, this solution is very different from other industry overlay solutions.   It's different in that the ACI overlay provides integrated/embedded support for both physical and virtual servers, it allows use of existing L4-7 infrastructure, while providing the automation functionality of the ACI policy model.

If you'd like to learn more, there is a summary, as well as a white paper available.  There is also this video whiteboard session that covers a subset of the elements mentioned above.