I was reading a recent post over on Ethereal Mind about VCE choosing to go with Cisco ACI for their software defined networking strategy (read more about that here). It’s an old article from Greg but it hits on something that’s bothered me recently. I wrote about Cisco ACI a few months ago and the problems that are faced by those that use OTV on Nexus 7000 switches. As I mentioned then ACI is not something that I can even consider until FCoE is supported as well as OTV on the Nexus 9000 ASIC.

Cisco and NetApp joined forces last year to let everyone know that Flexpod will not support VMware NSX (CRN & Network World). This is a sad state of affairs. NSX is really picking up speed and out of all the enterprise based software defined networking solutions out there it’s the best pick of the bunch but the simple fact that Flexpod is not going to support it rules it out for quite a few customers. I can think of quite a few use cases for NSX within our environment but without support it’s suicidal to doing anything with it. I only hope that Cisco and NetApp rethink their decision on NSX in the future to open up a great tool to their customers rather than restricting their customers to a solution that is not yet mature enough to provide all the services that are required to support Flexpod. I understand Ciscos need to push ACI but if their product doesn’t support some fundamental features please don’t lock customers down to not being able to use other, potentially superior, tools.

Rant over!