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 Tetration Analytics platform consumes this telemetry data, and by using unsupervised machine learning and behavior analysis it can provide outstanding pervasive visibility across everything in your data center in real time. By using algorithmic approaches, the Cisco Tetration Analytics platform provides deep insights into applications and interactions, enabling dramatically simplified operations, a zero-trust model, and migration of applications to any programmable infrastructure.

These Layer 2 and 3 nonblocking switches support 1, 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet; Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)^[1]; and 8-, 16-, and 32-Gbps Fibre Channel1 (native Fibre Channel support is available on 9300-FX Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP) models only), with up to 3.6 Terabits per second (Tbps) of internal bandwidth. In addition, the 9300-FX switches support the IEEE 802.1ae MAC Security (MACsec) standard on all downlink and uplink ports, allowing traffic encryption at the physical layer and providing secure server, border leaf, and leaf-to-spine connectivity.