Cisco ACE 4700 Series Application Control Engine Appliances

Founded in 1979, Ingram Micro Inc. is the world's largest technology distributor and a leading technology sales, marketing, and logistics company. The company creates sales and profitability opportunities for vendors and resellers through unique marketing programs, outsourced logistics services, technical support, financial services, and product aggregation and distribution.

Ingram Micro has one data center located in Dallas that operates two networks: one that serves as the legacy network and an infrastructure rationalization (IR) network that is used in three tiers for the company's distribution and access layers. The overall network infrastructure at Ingram Micro predominantly consists of Cisco® products, including Cisco ACE Application Control Engine Modules (ACE) for Cisco Catalyst® 6509 Series Switches and integrated firewall service modules.

Most of Ingram Micro's websites are interactive and provide customers and partners access to manage accounts and inventory through the websites. According to Joe Fuller, infrastructure architect for Ingram Micro, as he and his team began evaluating the website performance, they began looking into ways of upgrading the network to handle a variety of access vehicles.

"We sought outside consultants to help us decide how to put together a new network that would be highly extensible and expandable for the next five or six years that could handle data, voice, and video with the ultimate goal of collapsing all those services down into the network," says Fuller. "But when we looked deeper, we discovered that our legacy network was flat, and many of the applications had little or no rigor."

Fuller says as the upgrade project progressed, he realized that he needed an application acceleration solution to improve the new network performance.

"Our network and infrastructure upgrade forced us to look at adding more rigors and more discipline into how we design our homegrown applications, as well as maintain and deploy applications as a whole," says Fuller. "We began looking at application acceleration offerings that would help us speed up delivery and improve overall performance."

Because Ingram Micro had already achieved great results with Cisco through the Catalysts, Fuller decided to try Cisco ACE modules that were already deployed in Ingram's network infrastructure into the legacy and IR networks.

"The way ACE came into production was rather sudden," says Fuller. "We had been using Cisco ACE modules between the various tiers or distribution layers of our six-tiered network that represent our Internet and Extranet, and when we learned we would not be able to expand with the acceleration solution we had been using from the other vendor, we decided to leverage what we already had sitting in our network."

Fuller says the Cisco ACE Modules outperformed the acceleration solution from the other vendor and the virtualization capabilities in ACE were key in their decision to purchase three ACE 4710 Appliance Control Engine Appliances.

"The problem with the other application acceleration solution we had been using was that it could only cover about four VLANS at a maximum and realistically only two," says Fuller. "Cisco ACE really expanded upon our load-balancing capabilities across the entire network, whereas with the other solution, we could only load balance VLANS where we had the interface coming out of the vendor box. With ACE, we could essentially virtualize across the entire infrastructure by building virtual contexts."

The ability to standardize all IT infrastructure equipment with one vendor was a major plus of the upgrade according to Fuller.

"From a pure integration standpoint, ACE was a great candidate," says Fuller. "We had looked at several other devices, and the one thing that stood out for us with the ACE was that we could hook cable to run connections from the router switch to the load balancer and smoothly integrate it into the network fabric. Had we chosen a device solution that was non-Cisco, we never would have achieved the luxury of having the back-playing speed of ACE and the devices being a natural part of the switching fabric."

Fuller says the all-in-one multifunctional aspect of Cisco ACE was a compelling selling point.

"In comparison with the other application acceleration products currently available, ACE had everything we needed," says Fuller. "ACE was highly customizable, which we consider a very good thing given our situation where we never know what our developers will ask us to do. Having the ability to customize and accommodate was handy, and because our crew was already familiar with Cisco products, the learning curve was relatively short. As we saw it, the ACE was a beautiful thing: one integrated package all playing together in concert."

The ability to utilize ACE's virtualization capabilities is a result of the upgrade, according to Fuller.

"Being able to use virtualization as we partition for development, staging, and production is one of the key features that we heavily rely upon, especially in terms of the international web deployment," says Fuller. "We currently have at least three or four contexts deployed on the ACE Module and expect to move everything that is currently sitting on the previous application acceleration devices over to ACE over the next few months. Being able to separate things like context in ACE will come in handy for rationalizing situations and is going to be the hallmark of what we use to solve our security woes."

Cisco ACE's monitoring and tight security role-based access control (RBAC) abilities are expected to give Ingram Micro customers and partners a new level of confidence, according to Fuller.

"Faster provisioning and RBAC, from the standpoint of giving the development folks a way of monitoring, checking on their applications, and evaluating performance are very important to us," says Fuller. "Many times we have to deploy in staging situations that can be difficult, so the multi-context aspect is also important to us. ACE allows us to discover how it's going to work, staging the development prior to rolling it out into production."

In terms of return on investment, Fuller says cutting down on the number of man hours or cycle time is where he expects to get the biggest return with the ACE Modules and ACE Appliances.

"Building a server, getting the server deployed along with all the proper firewall rules along with opening ports, and into the box and into operations has been a challenge for us," says Fuller. "With the ACE modules and appliances, we can streamline these efforts and find that when resources are no longer needed, we can return them to the pool as quickly as possible. In the past, this has been something that has taken a long time, up to several months. We expect ACE modules and appliances to reduce months to weeks to hours and eventually from hours to minutes."

Find out more about Cisco ACE modules for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series and Cisco ACE 4710 Appliance Control Engine Appliances, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ace.