Recently, InfoWorld, a top IT publication, recognized Cisco's powerful SDN solution, ACI, with the Editor's Choice award based on an impressive overall review score of 9.6 out of 10. We've long-believed ACI is a breakthrough capability that offers greater automation and visibility, performance and scale, security, and openness, and this latest product review endorsement echoes our beliefs.

Here's a breakdown of the InfoWorld Scorecard:

Cisco ACI shakes up SDN!

Customer adoption of ACI and the APIC continue to accelerate, and the extensive InfoWorld article by Paul Venezia provides a full report on the Cisco ACI solution to further demonstrate and legitimize ACI's leading capabilities.

Key points from the product review include:

• "Cisco ACI is a powerful solution that's designed for large-scale deployments. It represents a significant step away from traditional networking in both design and scale, and a significant step forward in managing Cisco networks through an open and modern API control structure."

• "At a high level, this is what ACI is - it is a method of building and maintaining a networking fabric that dispenses with the concepts of traditional networking, and offers significant software control, automation, and wire-speed switching on a very large scale."

• "ACI even provides a way to go back in time to see where faults or problems may have begun. This operates at a surprisingly low level, to the point where it's possible to select several objects in the fabric and show packet-level details on traffic relating to that object several hours in the past. ...Further, you can export statistics if you need data over a longer period. This tool can prove extremely helpful in troubleshooting efforts."

The Cisco ACI momentum continues

Today we have 5,000 Cisco Nexus 9000 customers globally, nearly 500 ecosystem partners and according to Gartner, ACI is outpacing NSX 2:1. I also suspect this isn't the first or the last time we'll be talking about Cisco ACI endorsements either. And, as the article so appropriately states, "Exactly how far Cisco and its customers will be able to push ACI will depend on who climbs on board."

Learn how you can 'shake up SDN' and benefit with Cisco ACI.