Red Hat and Cisco are market leaders offering best in class technology with the solutions to deliver on the business outcomes our customers need.  Red Hat is a clear leader in cloud native with Open Shift and Ansible.  Cisco is a leader in networking and converged infrastructure, both of which matter when implementing cloud native and automation solutions.

Implementing automation has become table stakes for the enterprise.  Reducing repetitive, error-prone manual tasks and streamlining infrastructure management allows IT personnel to focus on more strategic initiatives.

The Cisco Red Hat partnership was driven by our mutual customers asking us to work more closely together. In response, Cisco and Red Hat have combined forces to bring cloud-native and automation solutions to market.  These solutions enable our mutual customers to deploy systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable, while also leveraging automation to make changes frequently and predictably with minimal effort.

Cloud native: Cisco Validated Designs for OpenShift

Cisco and Red Hat recently released three Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) that utilize Red Hat OpenShift:

• VersaStack Solutions with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3 and IBM FlashSystem Family
• FlexPod Datacenter for OpenShift Container Platform 4 Design Guide
• FlashStack for OpenShift 4.3, a User-Provisioned Infrastructure Design Guide

A Cisco Validated Design consists of systems and architectures designed, tested, and documented to facilitate faster, more reliable, and more predictable customer deployments.

These CVDs help address many customer cloud migration and application modernization challenges, such as:

• Dealing with the complexities of integrating existing applications into hybrid/multicloud environments
• Refactoring and deploying cloud-native apps in an overall data and application architecture

To create these CVDs, a number of technologies were integrated with a comprehensive hybrid/multicloud reference architecture, including IBM and Red Hat containerized software with Cisco UCS compute and networking.

As an example of the value of running Red Hat software in a Cisco environment, FICO transitioned from an on-premises model to a cloud- and services-based infrastructure deploying Red Hat OpenStack on Cisco UCS. The result was a 50 percent reduction in solution time to market and reduced overall infrastructure costs.

Automation: Red Hat Ansible and Cisco Nexus-certified integration

Improving upon this response, Cisco wrote Ansible modules to automate network tasks through the NX-OS, ACI, and other Cisco networking APIs. These modules make it possible to streamline network operations, align with security requirements, and orchestrate infrastructure rapidly and at scale, helping our mutual customers:

• Reduce operations labor and tools cost
• Simplify and speed the introduction of network capabilities to meet the demands of the business
• Accelerate the transition from traditional IT to DevOps to keep pace with the rapid development of applications and the needs of the business

For more information on Cisco integrations with Ansible, visit here.

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