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IDC Highlights Potential of Application-Centric Infrastructure in Middle East
Published Nov 20, 2013
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Leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC has highlighted the potential for application-centric infrastructure (ACI) to benefit businesses and organisations in the Middle East.
The ACI approach was recently announced by Cisco, paving the way for the roll-out of the first data center and cloud solution built around the needs of applications. The system offers full visibility, and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources.
“Applications are the key to business functionality, and prepping the infrastructure to allow ease of deployment and management of applications is a key business concern. IDC views the ACI solution as an enabler of intelligent infrastructure that reduces complexity and latency in application deployment. This creates a more cost effective infrastructure,” said Zeeshan Gaya, Research Manager - Security Appliances, Virtualization, Servers and Storage Systems, IDC Middle East Turkey and Africa
“IDC considers the Middle East market as being reflective of the global market, which is seeking to gain benefits by reducing infrastructure complexity and improving application agility. There is also a growing trend to tie infrastructure more tightly to the application and converged infrastructure.”
“ACI provides a standardised template, which defines a set of parameters associated with delivering an application,” added Gaya.
“It is designed to save on the configuration time spent at each physical point in the infrastructure. Additionally, the solution does not discriminate between physical or virtual applications, and is also configured to integrate with a number of third party solutions.”
IDC notes that that those standing to gain from ACI include cloud service providers, banks and financial institutions and government entities. IDC also believes that the technology could appeal to businesses or organisations that may have held off on major infrastructure investments due to current complexity with their application ecosystem. In addition, there is a new opportunity for systems integrators, as they can deliver seamless solutions to customers that couples the infrastructure with relevant applications
ACI combines innovations in software, hardware, systems and application specific integrated circuits (ASICS) with a dynamic, application-aware network policy model structured around open application programming interfaces (APIs).
ACI stands apart from current approaches, which are often operationally siloed, and with no common or policy operational model between application, network, security and cloud teams
Cisco’s innovation also addresses other pressing issues such as static and inflexible security models, as well as the operational headache of multiple management points, proprietary licensing models, software version control issues, and consistency across multiple hypervisor environments.
The system can reduce application deployment from months to minutes by unifying physical and virtual networks and offering unprecedented security, compliance and real-time visibility at system, tenant, and application levels.
Furthermore, Cisco’s data center switching innovations enable the network to rapidly respond to application development teams while delivering up to 75 percent total cost of ownership savings compared to merchant, silicon-based switches, and software-only network virtualization solutions.
“A new paradigm shift driven by cloud, mobility and big data is redefining IT, with the web-based economy shifting to an app-based economy,” said Rabih Dabboussi, Managing Director, Cisco UAE.
“IT leaders want innovations that enable application automation for rapid deployment of infrastructure and dynamic adjustment to real-time events, integrated visibility with telemetry for performance monitoring and resilient recovery from failure. They also demand optimized performance across diverse applications needs with simplicity and control. Bolted-on approaches are becoming a thing of the past, and the failure of companies to adapt will likely see them fall behind the competition in terms of profit and innovation.”
Cisco’s ACI comprises the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), enhanced versions of the NX-OS operating system and the new Nexus 9000 portfolio.
The latter is the cornerstone of the ACI solution, and includes state-of-the-art system innovations such as the industry’s first backplane-free modular switch to provide investment protection, efficient power and cooling, and a simpler design that is twice as effective at improving meantime between failures.
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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