How Cisco Tetration Analytics Helps Enable Cisco IT Migrate Applications to ACI

Cisco IT has made an initial implementation of the Cisco® Tetration Analytics solution as part of our plan to move all Cisco data centers to a Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI ) design. The goal of this implementation is to better understand dependencies among applications in order to simplify the ACI migration effort and enable adoption of the ACI whitelist security model.

Cisco ACI enables us to use a common operating model across physical and virtual data center environments that is both application-aware and policy-based. With Cisco ACI we can specify core infrastructure services once for the entire fabric, then let applications consume those services directly.

Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers telemetry data from hardware and software sensors, then analyzes the information using advanced machine learning techniques. The Tetration Analytics platform provides the deep understanding of application dependencies necessary to simplify application migration to Cisco ACI.

Cisco IT deployed two clusters of the Tetration Analytics platform on premises and we deployed 4000 sensors on Linux hosts to collect network flows for the analytics. The diagram below shows the high-level deployment concept for the Cisco Tetration Analytics solution.

Dependency mapping, which helps us dynamically discover an application’s host groupings. It also provides greater visibility and meaningful understanding of flows to and from applications.We expect to gain value from the Cisco Tetration Analytics solution in three primary areas:

Security changes that harden applications through network security and, in the future, will provide enhanced detection of threats and malicious behavior.

Future application performance improvements that are based on better information about network and application latency.

The Cisco Tetration Analytics solution will also help us adopt ACI in an application-centric approach, which is a guiding principle from the ACI architecture perspective. We have already seen positive outcomes from testing this new approach to application migration with a Hadoop use case.

In the future, the combination of Cisco Tetration Analytics and ACI will give us more capabilities for analyzing application performance and improving data center security. Learn more about this Cisco IT implementation in my session for Cisco Live US 2016: http://www.ciscolive.com/us/learn/sessions/session-catalog/?search=anitha