If you have been following the news, I'm sure you saw that Cisco just introduced Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Combine ACI with Cisco UCS Director and you can provision and deliver application-centric infrastructure automatically.

Over the past 11 months, I have discussed how Cisco UCS Director reduces data center complexity with unified automation and management of multi-vendor converged and integrated infrastructure systems. But the provisioning of compute, storage and network resources is just the start. IT needs to deliver infrastructure that is tailor-made for the specific applications their users need. Together with ACI, Cisco UCS Director has key capabilities to make this happen.

UCS Director's task library lets you easily drag-and-drop your way to complex workflows that provision the infrastruture for your applications. It also delivers centralized automation, orchestration and management for the Cisco ACI fabric along with detailed inventory collection and specific resource consumption for each tenant.

But to take advantage of UCS Director for application-based infrastructure delivery, you need ACI. Together, these two solutions deliver application-driven policies that abstract and automate the deployment of network, security and application services. Together, they fundamentally redefine the way you provision data center networks for rapid and consistent deployment of applications and predictable network services.

If you would like to go deeper on Cisco ACI, watch this video:

https://www.youtu.be/e__8x_5eQ4w

In addition to UCS Director, Cisco's cloud management and Prime network management software solutions will support and integrate with ACI in the near future.

So where is your data center on the spectrum of automation? Are you provisioning infrastructure automatically but not for application-based infrastructure requests? Evaluate your data center requirements and see if Cisco UCS Director and ACI can help you manage your infrastructure and applications more effectively.

To learn more about Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, go here.