INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
Cisco helps automate
Experian’s worldwide
data centres
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redundancy. “With Cisco ACI, we have
more granular control of traffic, policy and
security,” said Abner. “For example, we can
make a change to a single tenant or server
with contracts and filters instead of making
changes to the firewalls. It’s easier, less risky
and doesn’t impact the entire environment.”
Aligning virtual and
physical environments
To further extend data centre consistency
and operational efficiency, Experian is
now testing and preparing to deploy the
new Cisco ACI Virtual Edge (AVE). The
next generation of the Cisco Application
Virtual Switch (AVS), AVE is a hypervisor-
independent virtual appliance that pushes
the functionality and control of Cisco ACI
into virtual environments.
C
isco Application Centric Infrastructure
(Cisco ACI) will serve as the
foundation for Experian’s data
centres and colocation sites around the
globe. With a standardised, integrated
network architecture, Experian will be able
to consistently deploy, manage and secure
applications across dozens of regionally
distributed computing sites.
Recently named one of Forbes’ Top 100
‘World’s Most Innovative Companies’ in
2018, Experian launched a global data
centre innovation initiative to modernise,
standardise and automate its data centre
technology. Cisco ACI will provide improved
global technology operations for Experian,
which has one of the largest databases of
consumer information in the world. ACI is
the core technology for Cisco intent-based
networking in data centres.
www.intelligentcio.com
“We wanted to standardise our network
architecture and IT operations worldwide,”
said Robert Abner, Senior Network Engineer
at Experian. “And we wanted to implement
policy-based automation so that changes
could be made universally instead of one
switch, one data centre and one region
at a time. With Cisco ACI, we can develop
standardised scripts and policies and then
push them to all of our sites.”
Connecting data centres in
key regions
Experian is using Cisco ACI Multipod to
logically connect multiple data centres
within three key regions: the US, the UK and
Brazil, which allows them to be managed as
one big data centre. Regional resources can
be managed collectively and workloads can
be spread among multiple sites for greater
“ACI Virtual Edge will eliminate the
overhead of VLAN management and it
will allow us to configure once and deploy
everywhere, which will save time and costs,”
said Abner. “It will also enable us to track
communications between virtual and
physical machines.”
Intent-based networking
Intent-based networking represents a
fundamental shift in the way networks are
built and managed. Moving away from the
manual, time-intensive methods by which
networks are traditionally managed, these
modern networks capture business intent
and translate it into network policies. These
policies are then automatically activated
across the entire infrastructure, with the
assurance that the business intent is delivered
as planned. Cisco is leading the intent-based
networking revolution by transforming the
entire network – from the data centre and
campus, to the branch and edge. n
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