From the beginning Microsoft has been a strategic partner with Cisco in the development of our Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technologies and solutions. In fact Cisco CEO John Chambers shared the stage with Microsoft's Satya Nadella at the ACI launch several months ago in New York City.

ACI itself in the data center is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles. ACI delivers software flexibility with the scalability of hardware performance. Traditionally, IT approaches took a siloed operational view, with no common operational model between the application, network, security, and cloud teams.  With ACI, a common network operational model delivers IT application agility, simplified operations across teams, assured network and application performance, and scale.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZWwjNAiUpI

Video 1. ACI Overview Video

Cisco's R&D teams, working with Microsoft, have focused on two initial areas of ACI integration within the Microsoft software stack. First the infrastructure area, with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Windows Azure Pack ACI integration. Second the application area with Cisco Validated Designs supporting FlexPod integrated infrastructure solutions with ACI integration with the Exchange and SharePoint workloads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17wynsfnttc

Video 2. ACI Video on Windows Azure Pack Integration

To learn more about Cisco, Microsoft and our efforts around ACI please visit us at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago, May 4 -8:

• We'll be in booth#122 at Microsoft Ignite and have ACI demos and theatre presentations ready to go.

• At Ignite, Cisco Senior Director Shashi Kiran will be presenting on ACI during this speaking session at Ignite. We encourage you to attend.

• Finally take a look at the technical whitepaper on our integration with System Center and WAP. Try to attend some of the Microsoft WAP sessions at Ignite -we will be there.

Cisco is committed to providing an optimum IT environment for your Microsoft oriented Data Centers. Our UCS server family has proven itself to be a powerful compute platform for Microsoft applications -for example holding world record TPC benchmarks for SQL Server 2014.  We feel just as positive on ACI -it will be as revolutionary as UCS has been and will enable IT to achieve the needed operational efficiency, rapid deployments, higher availability, and increased customer satisfaction in today's application economy.