Cisco & Partners Unveil OpFlex

LAS VEGAS -- Building on its vision of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) in the data center, Cisco and industry leaders today continued the transformation of information technology (IT) with the adoption of a new open, standards-based protocol called OpFlex. Through OpFlex, Cisco ACI continues to deliver the standards-based building blocks for next-generation networks while accelerating innovation with multiple industry leaders. Cisco customers such as Sungard Availability Services, du, Acxiom and Telstra are rapidly adopting the new Nexus 9000 switching platform for their transition to 40Gigabit Ethernet speeds and embracing ACI as the new model for automating data center infrastructure to support critical business applications.

For example, Acxiom, an enterprise data, analytics and software-as-a-service company that uniquely fuses trust, experience and scale to fuel data-driven results, is adopting the new Nexus switches and ACI. “Every week, Acxiom powers millions of transactions on behalf of our global clients, and we need a powerful 40GbE data center with optimal performance and scalability,” said Chuck Crane, Network and Security Architect Acxiom. “Cisco is a trusted, knowledgeable partner, and with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), we know we have an open, future-proof data center architecture that can continue to grow as we enhance client services. Cisco’s 9500 switching platform; Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) for centralized management; and the OpFlex southbound protocol, all combine to offer the most compelling high performance, scalable data center solution on the market today.”

ACI is the first data center and cloud solution to offer full visibility and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources, accelerating application deployment through a dynamic, application-aware network policy model. ACI’s policy-based approach will be extended to a growing vendor ecosystem, allowing customers to leverage application-aware policies across multiple hypervisors, physical switches, and network services to protect their existing data center investments.

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)

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