Forward Networks Announces Support of Cisco ACI

Company Addresses Network Verification Need for Cisco ACI Customers to Realize Benefits of Intent-Based Networking

Forward Networks, the industry leader in network assurance and intent-based verification, announced at Cisco Live 2019 in Barcelona support for Cisco ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure). Organizations that use Cisco ACI as an SDN/network automation solution can incorporate Forward Enterprise into their environments. Forward’s advanced software delivers a “digital twin” of the network, enabling network operators to verify intent, predict network behavior, avoid outages, and simplify network management.

The nature of Forward Networks’ solution is to provide deep and intelligent analysis about network behavior based on device configurations and operating details. With the support for Cisco ACI, expected to be released in Forward Enterprise in Q2 of 2019, the company can provide insight into how the virtual networking platform works as well as the policies that are in place. Forward Enterprise analyzes networks based on ACI to confirm error-free network designs overall. This includes correctness for ACI infrastructure, as well as other network devices such as firewalls and load balancers that are connected to ACI, for an end-to-end multi-vendor solution across all network services.

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“We continue to support leading network technologies, focusing on providing full coverage of our customers’ networks with our Forward Enterprise platform. The growing market presence and level of innovation that ACI brings to the industry are reflected in our decision to support it,” said David Erickson, CEO at Forward Networks.

ACI allows customers to define policies by assigning virtual applications to security groups, called end-point groups (EPGs). Virtual network policies are assigned to EPGs. Forward Enterprise verifies policies and displays how the network will behave and can translate the EPG policies from ACI into the Forward Networks’ system and show or verify the resulting network behavior. Forward Networks’ technology can then go on to compare the resulting behavior to intent and see if there are any deviations that should be addressed.

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“With this new support for ACI, we are bringing the benefits of intent-based networking to all networks, no matter what vendors, technology, and protocols exist in the network environment,” said Chiara Regale, VP of Product at Forward Networks. “Accurately modeling the behavior of each device in a large network, across vendors, is an enormous problem. No other vendor is addressing this problem to the extent and scale that Forward Networks has, with a significant portion of the company’s engineering team dedicated to modeling third-party devices and technology.”

Forward Networks is vendor-agnostic, providing support for all major networking and security vendor devices. Forward Networks simplifies management of the entire network, by supporting not only on-premises data centers, but also public cloud and hybrid cloud networks.’

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