The potential of an application-centric infrastructure to benefit businesses and organisations in the Middle East was highlighted by leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC.

The ACI approach, which was recently announced by Cisco, paved the way for the roll-out of the first data centre and cloud solution built around the needs of applications, offering full visibility, and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources, said a senior official.

“Applications are the key to business functionality, and prepping the infrastructure to allow ease of deployment and management of applications is a key business concern," said Zeeshan Gaya, research manager - Security Appliances, Virtualisation, Servers and Storage Systems, IDC Middle East Turkey and Africa.

"IDC views the ACI solution as an enabler of intelligent infrastructure that reduces complexity and latency in application deployment. This creates a more cost effective infrastructure,” he said.

“ACI provides a standardised template, which defines a set of parameters associated with delivering an application,” said Gaya.

“It is designed to save on the configuration time spent at each physical point in the infrastructure. Additionally, the solution does not discriminate between physical or virtual applications, and is also configured to integrate with a number of third party solutions,” he added.

The firms that will gain from ACI include cloud service providers, banks and financial institutions and government entities, it said. It also believes that the technology could appeal to businesses or organisations that may have held off on major infrastructure investments due to current complexity with their application ecosystem.

ACI combines innovations in software, hardware, systems and application specific integrated circuits (ASICS) with a n application-aware network policy model structured around open application programming interfaces (APIs).

The innovation also addresses other pressing issues such as static and inflexible security models, as well as the operational headache of multiple management points, proprietary licensing models, software version control issues, and consistency across multiple hypervisor environments, said a statement.

Furthermore, Cisco’s data centre switching innovations enable the network to rapidly respond to application development teams while delivering up to 75 per cent total cost of ownership savings compared to merchant, silicon-based switches, and software-only network virtualisation solutions, it said.

Cisco’s ACI comprises the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), enhanced versions of the NX-OS operating system and the new Nexus 9000 portfolio. - TradeArabia News Service