Cisco Data Center Advanced Services

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Overview

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As organizations face increasing demands for agile, scalable, and automated data center environments, this course equips learners with essential skills to harness programmable infrastructure. This course covers Cisco NX-OS programming tools and models such as Nexus API, Python, Ansible, and Terraform, enabling automation of manual, error-prone tasks to accelerate deployment and improve resource utilization. Learners gain a comprehensive understanding of Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI), a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture that integrates physical and virtual environments under a unified policy model for networks, servers, storage, services, and security. The course highlights Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Fabric Controller, which provide centralized management and automation capabilities, simplifying operations across data center, WAN, access, and cloud environments. Cisco ACI’s application-centric policy model dynamically aligns the network fabric with application requirements, reducing complexity and enabling rapid application changes. This empowers IT teams—including SDN network, cloud, DevOps, and security groups—to respond swiftly to evolving business needs, enhancing agility and business value. What sets this course apart is its focus on programmable infrastructure that supports dynamic, elastic cloud-computing environments without human intervention. By completing this course, learners will be prepared to deploy, manage, and optimize Cisco’s advanced data center solutions, positioning themselves as valuable contributors in modern, automated IT environments.

Syllabus

Automating the Data Center

A programmable infrastructure can support dynamic and elastic cloud-computing environments without human intervention. It can manage the entire system as a single logical entity within a higher-level framework. It automates tedious, manual, error-prone processes while speeding deployment and reducing errors. Users can deploy the available programmability tools to increase resource utilization and provide greater flexibility and scalability.

Describing Cisco Nexus Dashboard

IT is constantly being challenged to quickly align with company business needs. People want to easily obtain data center resources. A good starting point for automation is infrastructure delivery. Infrastructure includes a broad set of processes. Cisco offers a wide variety of tools that can help you automate tasks to be more efficient in delivering data center resources. In this course, you will learn about Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller.

Describing Cisco ACI

Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a comprehensive software-defined network (SDN) architecture for data centers. It provides a policy-based automation solution to integrate physical and virtual environments under one policy model for networks, servers, storage, services, and security. Cisco ACI provides a network that you deploy, monitor, and manage in a way that benefits various teams in your IT organization. Teams include the SDN network, cloud, DevOps, and security. It supports rapid application changes by reducing complexity with a common policy framework that can automate provisioning and resource management across data center, WAN, access, and cloud environments. This system empowers IT to be more responsive to changing business and application needs. This ability enhances agility and adds business value. Cisco ACI is built on the following:Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (Cisco APIC)Cisco ACI fabric Cisco ACI partner ecosystem Cisco ACI provides a single architecture for delivering performance, programmability, agility, and reduced complexity. An application-centric policy model dynamically defines the network fabric with the application requirements, so the application dictates the network, not the other way around.

Describing Cloud Computing

Companies and businesses that want to offer their services or products to users via the internet tend to build their own IT infrastructure. They must purchase servers, switches, routers, cables, and other devices and also build or rent a space to locate these devices. Then, they pay the cooling and electricity bills. Most importantly, they must hire new employees such as network engineers, administrators, and data center engineers and invest in their knowledge. Other consideration when building your own data center include mandatory software and hardware upgrades, security, data center maintenance, backups, and the cost that accompanies owning your own IT infrastructure. For this reason, more businesses are using cloud computing. Compared to traditional IT infrastructure, the cloud computing approach can be resilient, flexible, secure, and automated without the deployment and maintenance overhead. With cloud computing, servers, networking devices, and other equipment are hosted in the cloud and not on the premises of the businesses using them. The company that offers the cloud services buys, owns, and maintains the equipment and rents it to other companies who use those services. Therefore, this approach can be more cost-effective in certain scenarios. There is no initial investment (or the initial investment is minimal), and the services are paid for on a pay-per-use basis. Companies that provide cloud services normally host their servers in many cities, countries, and continents. The cloud computing approach allows companies to quickly expand globally, an important goal in this always-on digital world.