Case Study ACI - APDL

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Industry: Logistics

Solution: Data Center

The Client 

Autoridade Portuária do Douro, Leixões e Viana do Castelo (APDL) is a public company, whose goal is to manage the region's ports, carrying out their economic exploration, conservation and development. With 5 km of pier, 55 ha of landfills and 120 ha of wetland, Porto de Leixões is equipped with the most advanced management and security of port traffic systems. The services provided cover all aspects of shipping and operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The adoption of emerging technologies has been one of the most prominent criteria for the success and development of port business, according to the APDL administration.

Challenge

APDL was looking for a Data Center switching solution (with redundancy, robustness, security and web interface), which would allow the extension of the data center, as well as its micro segmentation, facilitating agility in application management, high performance and automation.

Solution

Given the needs of APDL, Logicalis implemented the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) solution because, in addition to being the industry leader, it automates the network and security in a web interface for workloads on physical servers, virtual machines, containers or public cloud.

Providing:

• Interconnection automation of multiple on-prem data centers and cloud
  data centers;
• Universal Policy that facilitates a consistent security posture and allows business continuity, speeding up any disaster recoveries.
• Centralized Management: single dashboard for management, visibility, monitoring and troubleshooting in multi-cloud environments.
• Expansion of Lan and Wan Networks through the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) in order to unify the management and automation of the network through the data center and the corporate network.

The Results

The ACI solution helped APDL to optimize its work management and to solve network problems more efficiently.

The company itself changed its mentality regarding configuration, abstracting from protocols, to a new paradigm.

It also allowed them to start thinking about features and to combine a set of technologies.

Additionally, it provided the ability to view the entire network as a single entity, and systematize the way in which the APDL configures applications (reducing configuration time, complexity and accelerating their implementation in the infrastructure of wired and wireless networks).