This blog post originally appeared in Cisco's Data Center Blog site
Software load balancers are making a big splash in recent times driven by developer-centric and application-led initiatives. Adding to this growing space of excitement is the up and coming Avi Networks (a Gartner Cool Vendor in Enterprise Networking 2016) which makes load balancers cool again!
Cisco ACI has partnered with L4-L7 application networking specialist, Avi Networks, to deliver automation and application agility across the complete application lifecycle. Avi Networks integrates with Cisco ACI and APIC to deliver flexible, high performance load balancing, application analytics, and predictive auto scaling services.
A few months ago we shared an example of how Cisco ACI and the Avi Vantage platform delivered automated services at a leading financial services firm. Continuing with this success, we are happy to bring another new customer success story in this blog.
Challenges: This customer success story features a large multinational security company providing critical, always-on security services for hundreds of millions of active users, and running billions of transactions every day across more than 150 countries. For the customer, a network that can scale, perform and support application agility stood among the major requirements to support their massive network operations.
Why Cisco ACI – Avi Networks solution as the choice for this customer? The ease of automation, performance scaling possible with Avi and ACI solution, and the resulting huge operating cost savings were the major reasons for the customer’s decision. The ACI-Avi networks infrastructure handled more than 100,000 SSL connections per second. Alternatives could not handle such magnitudes of scale in their VM-centric environment. Besides, the environment is managed from a central location, with no additional manpower needed as their network and applications expand rapidly. Applications can be provisioned in minutes versus days (as was the case with legacy infrastructure), and issues resolved easily. One network architect even shared that the solution has dramatically reduced the network team’s “Mean Time To Innocence”, allowing them to triage performance issues on the fly.
Business benefits delivered by ACI-Avi solution:
Simplicity of Implementation: The elegant architecture, seamless integration and REST API based automation of Cisco ACI/APIC and Avi Networks means ACI can be implemented on the networking elements in a day. Avi’s L4-L7 application services can be integrated within 30 minutes. Running on standard x86, the Avi Vantage software-defined application services platform is simple to implement and scale-out, and even scale-in if capacity is not needed, automatically reducing costs.
Improved Operations: Complementing implementation and integration, subsequent operations have been automated so applications can get serviced within minutes, versus days in legacy environments. Therefore the lines-of-business get what they need fast, while operations can concentrate on advanced projects and troubleshooting, even as their environments scale.
Application Troubleshooting and Insights: The Avi admin console presents intuitive tree-views of the network topology with granular details of virtual services, all the way to the server pool and pool member details along with health scores that highlights potential application performance issues. This allows the network team to get pinpoint analytics and visibility into application performance. Gone are the days when internal customers and application owners had to wait for several hours or even days to get answers about what was ailing their applications. On many occasions, issues were solved even during the phone call to log the trouble ticket. The team is also able to empower lines of business with role-based access to different application owners to monitor their respective applications.
Enhanced Security: The Avi Vantage platform is integrated into the fabric of the architecture, so a universal security policies can be implemented on Avi’s intuitive and centrally managed Controller.
Cisco continues to leverage its partnerships to deliver unprecedented operational simplicity, with common policy, management, and operation models across application, network, and security resources. Check out more about our partner Avi Networks at https://avinetworks.com and their integration with Cisco ACI.
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