IT market research and advisory firm IDC has highlighted the potential for Application-Centric Infrastructure to benefit businesses and organisations in the Middle East.
The ACI approach was recently announced by Cisco, and it aims to allow data center and cloud solutions to be built around the needs of applications.
The system offers integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources.
“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.”
IDC says that cloud service providers, banks, financial institutions and government entities could all benefit from ACI.
It also believes that the technology could appeal to businesses or organisations that have held off on major infrastructure investments due to current complexity with their application ecosystem.
ACI combines innovations in software, hardware, systems and application specific integrated circuits (ASICS) with an application-aware network policy model structured around open application programming interfaces (APIs).
It has no common or policy operational model between application, network, security and cloud teams.
Cisco says the innovation also addresses pressing issues such as static and inflexible security models, multiple management points, proprietary licensing models, software version control issues, and consistency across multiple hypervisor environments.
It says the system can greatly speed up application deployment by unifying physical and virtual networks and offering security, compliance and real-time visibility at system, tenant, and application levels.
Cisco’s ACI comprises the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), enhanced versions of the NX-OS operating system and the new Nexus 9000 portfolio.
Dabboussi mentioned how the Middle East, like the rest of the world, has a need for ACI, “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,” he said.
