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VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: Tale of the Tape

VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: Tale of the Tape
Mike Robuck
Mike RobuckNovember 30, 2015
6:15 am MT
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Click here to return to Enter the Octagon: Cisco ACI vs. VMware NSX

Ali vs. Frazier, Hearns vs. Leonard, Liddell vs. Silva, and Rousey vs. Holm were, for various reasons, fights of epic proportions. Unlike those fights, the slugfest between VMware’s NSX and Cisco’s ACI will continue for years to come. Here’s a look at the contenders’ vital stats:

NSX ACI
Number of customer wins
900 1,100
Proportion of customers in production
15% to 20%* 10% to 20%*
Launch date
October 2013 July 2014
Origin story
NSX grew out of VMware’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Nicira Networks in 2012. ACI’s roots date back to Cisco’s $863 million acquisition of Insieme Networks in 2013.

* Gartner estimates

Smack talk

“The Cisco sales rep walks in and says ‘I’m going to sell you a switch.’ When they call me, I don’t have anything to sell, because I don’t sell switches. On the other hand, if I walk in and say, ‘I have a network virtualization solution running in the hypervisor, particularly vSphere, and it provides fully distributed firewall and all of these other services,’ Cisco doesn’t have anything.”
— Martin Casado, senior vice president, network and security, VMware

“What they [VMware] should do is figure out how to be cooperative in an open way, not in a proprietary way by locking down their APIs like they’re doing today. That’s done with multiprotocol BGP leveraging EVPN for VXLAN. We would be happy to work with VMware in that area.”
— Frank D’Agostino, CTO, Insieme Business Unit, Cisco

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Mike Robuck

About Mike Robuck

Mike Robuck is senior editor at SDxCentral.com where he covers enterprise and SD-WAN. He previously reported on the cable TV and telecommunications industries. Over the past 15 years, he has written long form, technology-based stories for magazines, as well as breaking news and daily e-newsletters stories. Coverage in telecommunications included business services, data, video and telephony. Robuck is based in Colorado and can be reached at mrobuck@sdxcentral.com.

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