I work at a typical place that got pitched ACI. One high up non technical manager started saying how much he loved it and the SDN buzzwords started trickling down to middle managers.
They want to convert sites consisting of modern Catalyst switches to 9K/ACI. Each site is 100-250 IP's with < 12 vlan's each. Very little changes are ever made to l2/l3.
They already bought the 9k's and the APIC's that have been sitting idle for years. The Cisco sales pitch included phrases like "it's so cheap to add ACI, even if you don't use it it's worth it for the option."
No one involved can state what exactly is so great about ACI, yet they claim it's great and "the future". Reading real life deployments from non Cisco employees have me thinking otherwise.
I went through the on-site Cisco technical sales meeting and was unimpressed with the entire thing. As an example, Cisco TSE's deflected for 5 minutes on whether the switch firewall capabilities were stateful or stateless.
None of my coworkers asked a critical question about the product.
All VM and network engineers have no ACI experience and plan to roll it out to production in 3 months without the help of Cisco or anyone else. They are talking application-centric at the start.
What can I do to make them see this is a horrible idea?
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