Data Center migrations to Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) for State Government.
- Assessment and Planning:
- Evaluate the existing data center infrastructure, including hardware, software, and networking equipment.
- Determine the objectives and requirements for the migration to ACI, considering scalability, performance, security, and compliance needs.
- Conduct a thorough analysis of applications, workloads, and traffic patterns to design an optimized ACI solution.
- Design and Architecture:
- Develop a comprehensive ACI architecture that aligns with the state government’s IT strategy and goals.
- Design the fabric architecture, including spine and leaf switches, controllers, and policies, to provide a scalable and resilient infrastructure.
- Define tenant policies, segmentation, and service insertion requirements to ensure secure multi-tenancy and application isolation.
- Preparation and Readiness:
- Prepare the existing data center environment for the migration, including upgrading hardware and software as needed.
- Conduct training sessions for IT staff to familiarize them with ACI concepts, configurations, and management interfaces.
- Define migration strategies and timelines, considering potential impacts on operations and services.
- Implementation and Deployment:
- Deploy ACI fabric according to the designed architecture, following best practices and configuration guidelines.
- Migrate applications and workloads to the new ACI fabric using phased approaches or parallel deployments to minimize disruptions.
- Validate the functionality and performance of migrated applications, ensuring seamless integration with ACI policies and services.
- Integration and Automation:
- Integrate ACI with existing management and monitoring tools to provide centralized visibility and control over the entire infrastructure.
- Implement automation and orchestration workflows to streamline provisioning, configuration management, and policy enforcement tasks.
- Leverage APIs and programmability features of ACI to integrate with other IT systems and enable custom workflows and applications.
- Testing and Validation:
- Perform comprehensive testing of the ACI fabric to validate its performance, scalability, and resilience under various scenarios.
- Conduct security assessments and penetration testing to identify and address any vulnerabilities in the ACI environment.
- Verify compliance with regulatory requirements and internal policies governing data center operations and security.
Date:
November 22, 2021