Challenges to Break Through IT Rigidity
Applications are rapidly changing at the pace of business. These changes place great demands on underlying infrastructure such as scale, multitenancy, etc. However, today’s manual approaches in data center applications deployment does not help meet these challenges. Customers are increasingly asking for a dynamic environment, for an automated and policy-based architectural approach capable of delivering application agility, mobility, rapid deployment, and visibility. The situation gets more challenging if L4 - L7 services are brought into consideration. The FortiGate Connector for Cisco ACI helps meet these challenges by accelerating application deployment with reliability, security, and multitenancy, without disrupting services operational best practices.
Highlights
- Delivers the best of both worlds for platform orchestration and network security agility
- Provides consistency and transparency across physical and virtual application workloads
- Deploys pre-defined security policies rapidly through complete application deployment lifecycle
- Automated L4 - L7 services reduces error prone manual configuration
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)
Cisco ACI® uses a holistic systems-based approach, with tight integration between physical and virtual elements, an open ecosystem model, and innovation-spanning application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), hardware, and software. This unique approach uses a common policy-based operating model across a network that supports Cisco ACI along with security elements (and computing and storage in the future), overcoming IT silos and drastically reducing costs and complexity.
Cisco ACI consists of an application policy infrastructure controller (APIC), Nexus® 9000 Series Switches (Cisco ACI spine and leaf switches), and the ACI ecosystem.
FortiGate Connector for Cisco ACI
FortiGate provides L4 - L7 service insertion and automation within ACI. The FortiGate Connector for Cisco ACI is a device package that contains XML metadata describing Fortinet’s security services and can be easily uploaded to Cisco APIC controller. The joint solution streamlines traffic to supported FortiGate appliances and assigns security policies on command for data center workloads.