The Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) solution in the data center is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. The Cisco ACI solution provides a robust transport network for today’s dynamic workloads. Cisco ACI is built on a network fabric that combines time-tested protocols with new innovations to create a highly flexible, scalable, and resilient architecture of low-latency, high-bandwidth links. This fabric delivers a network that can support the most demanding and flexible data center environments.

The Cisco ACI fabric consists of three major components:
- Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)
- Spine switches
- Leaf switches

Building on the success of first-generation Cisco Nexus® 9300 platform switches, the latest Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platforms can collect comprehensive Cisco Tetration Analytics™ telemetry information at line rate across all ports without adding any latency to the packets or negatively affecting switch performance. This telemetry information is exported every 100 milliseconds (ms) by default directly from the switch’s Application‑Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). This information consists of three types of data:

- Flow information: This information contains information about endpoints, protocols, ports, when the flow started, how long the flow was active, etc.
- Interpacket variation: This information captures any interpacket variations within the flow. Examples include variation in Time To Live (TTL), IP and TCP flags, payload length, etc.
- Context details: Context information is derived outside the packet header, including variation in buffer utilization, packet drops within a flow, association with tunnel endpoints, etc.

The Cisco Nexus 93180LC-EX Switch is the industry’s first 50-Gbps hardware capable 1RU switch that supports 3.6 Tbps of bandwidth and over 2.6 bpps across up to 24 fixed 40/50-Gbps QSFP+ ports and 6 fixed 40/100G-Gbps QSFP28 ports. While the switch consists of 32 ports of QSFP, ports numbered 26 and 28 are disabled and 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, and 32 can be configured as 40- and 100-Gbps ports. This switch is capable of supporting flexible port configurations.