Disaster Recovery Solutions for the Edge with HyperFlex and Cohesity

The edge computing architecture comes with a variety of benefits. Placement of compute, storage, and network resources close to the location at which data is being generated typically improves response times and may reduce WAN based network traffic between an Edge site and central data center. This stated the distributed nature of edge site architectures also introduces several challenges related to data protection and disaster recovery. One requirement is performing local backups with the ability to conduct local recovery operations. Another formidable challenge involves edge site disaster recovery. Planning for the inevitable edge site outage, be it temporary, elongated, or permanent is the problem this blog takes a deeper look into.

Business continuity planning focuses on items such as Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). These measurements are generally expressed in terms of a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Under the covers exists a collection of infrastructure building blocks that make adherence to an SLA possible. In simplistic terms, the building blocks include the ability to perform backups, the ability to create additional copies of backups, provide a methodology to transport backup copies to remote locations (replication), an intuitive management interface, and connects to a preconfigured recovery infrastructure.

From an operational standpoint, an edge site disaster recovery solution includes workflows that enable the ability to:

◉ Perform workload failover from an edge site to a central site.

◉ Protect failed over workload at a central site.

◉ Reverse replicate protected workloads from a central site back to an edge site at the point where the edge site is ready to receive inbound replication traffic.

◉ Failover again such that the edge site once again hosts production workloads.

◉ Test these operations without impacting production workloads.

Should an edge site failure or outage occur, workload failover to a disaster recovery site may become necessary. (Quite obviously, disaster recovery operations should be tested on an ongoing basis rather than just hoping things will work.) At the point where workload failover has been completed successfully, the failed over workload requires data protection. At the point where the edge site has been returned to an operational state, backup copies should be replicated back to the edge site. Alternatively, a new or different edge site may replace the original edge site. At some point, workload transition from the central site back to the edge site will occur.

HyperFlex with Cohesity Data Protect

Cohesity provides a number of DataProtect solutions to assist users in meeting data protection and disaster recovery business requirements. The Cohesity DataProtect product is available as a Virtual Edition and can be deployed as a single virtual machine hosted on a HyperFlex Edge cluster. A predefined small or large configuration is available for selection when the product is installed. The Cohesity DataProtect solution is also available in a ROBO Edition, running on a single Cisco UCS server.

Cohesity DataProtect edge solutions provide local protection of virtual machine workloads and can also replicate local backups to a larger centralized Cohesity cluster deployed on Cisco UCS servers.

Cohesity protection groups are configured and define the workloads to protect. Protection groups also include a policy that defines the frequency and retention period for local backups. The policy also defines a replication destination, replication frequency, as well as the retention period for replicated backups.

In summary, Cisco HyperFlex with Cohesity DataProtect has built-in workflows that enable easy workload failover and failover testing. At the point where reverse replication can be initiated, a simple policy modification is all that is required. Cohesity also features Helios, a centralized management facility that enables the entire solution to be managed from a single web-based console.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

Focus on HyperFlex: Sizing A New Cluster Using the Sizer and Profiler Tools

In this ‘Focus on HyperFlex’ blog, we’ll zero-in on different aspects of the Cisco HyperFlex (‘HX’) hyperconverged system and ways to make HX work best for you and your organization. This edition will illustrate on how to size a cluster when you might not have all the details of the workload worked out. In this situation, HyperFlex Profiler is the right approach to learn more about the workloads.

During my time in sales, teams often asked me to size a HyperFlex cluster and provide a customer quote. It was customary to have many more questions than the team or customer could answer about the application. Normally, they would provide me with an Excel sheet with some CPU and memory values. That is a great start, and it gave me deep insight into the customer’s application. However, an application profile is not only about averages of CPU and memory.  There are several more parameters needed, including the performance and latency peaks. With the customer’s permission, I would run a HyperFlex Profiler in their environment to gain more information about their application. Before installing the OVA on their vCenter, I would explain what HyperFlex Profiler is and how it helps with sizing their new HyperFlex environment. 

HyperFlex Profiler 

If there is no historical insight into the potential clustered application environment, then start with HyperFlex Profiler. HyperFlex Profiler will gather data on the vCenter environment and consolidate that mass of data to a single, easily digestible file. This file will quickly size the cluster after importing it into the HyperFlex Sizer tool and paint a clearer picture of the environment and workloads. 

However, profiling the environment is not a quick hit in a short period of time. The best approach is to run the HyperFlex Profiler for at least seven days or, preferably, 30 days. A longer measuring period ensures you capture data when “end of the month reports” are run. Of course, don’t just measure the environment during a weekend when there is little traffic! Be sure to capture at least one logical business cycle for that application. 

The HyperFlex Profiler is an OVA installed on a VMware environment. The only configuration is to provide (read-only) access to the vCenter environment and define which servers the HyperFlex Profiler will monitor. Multiple servers and/or clusters can be selected. For environments running different types of workloads, it is recommended to isolate them by selecting the servers in their environments – for instance, the VDI or the SQL environment. Of course, selecting all servers and workloads is also an option. Keep in mind that you will have more overhead this way. 

When it is monitoring the environment, you will see the following: 

More details about the environment can be shown in other tables and graphics, that can be exported in pdf format. 

It is essential to see the peaks of the environment. This way, you can make sure the new HyperFlex designed cluster can handle the workload, and ensure there is room for expansion. 

There are different graphs in the HyperFlex Profiler. Here you can see the metrics of the storage reads. Here, you have more insight into the frequently used block-size of the environment. This is one of them:

The next step is to use the power of the HyperFlex ProFiler to create a bill of material out of all the information from vCenter.  The data of the HyperFlex Profiler can be manually or automatically downloaded and uploaded to the HyperFlex Sizer. 

HyperFlex Sizer 

The HyperFlex Sizer is an online tool (https://hyperflexsizer.cloudapps.cisco.com/) accessible to both partners and customers. With this tool, you can add your personal, most commonly used workloads to a HyperFlex cluster and have the sizing tool decide the best option. HyperFlex Sizer takes the HyperFlex best practices into account when calculating the optimal solution. 

Furthermore, you can customize the sizing tool, using only the preferred components the customer wishes to see in the new HyperFlex environment. Different elements, like CPU, memory, types and sizes of drives, and more, can be customized. 

Uploading the data of the HX Profiler to the HX Sizer is entirely straightforward. After claiming the HX Profile into the HX Sizer, the tool will produce a practical Bill of Materials that can be the baseline of a  discussion with your partner about the best solution for your applications. 

Here is a screenshot of the HyperFlex Sizer where a HyperFlex cluster is calculated with the requested workload:

A variation of HyperFlex clusters may be advised. This is possible when you want to have different workloads, each with their characteristics. 

It shows the amount of HyperFlex or compute nodes, what type of nodes and  includes all the parts that are needed to create the solution. This way, you don’t have to configure everything manually, eliminating human errors.  

Create an estimate

Once you know the total size of the new HyperFlex cluster, partners or Cisco experts can easily upload the Bill of Material to Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW) and estimate the HyperFlex cluster.

In CCW, the estimate can be converted to an order.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

VDI Rapid Deploy – Enable Remote Work Fast!

Life as we all knew it changed in early 2020. Not only our personal lives, but our professional lives as well. Working from outside the office for most of us was a one-off, requiring our boss’s approval to do it for a day or two. Lots of organizations didn’t allow working remotely at all. Others had established remote work policies and had deployed the tools to enable it for a portion of their workforce.

When we were all suddenly thrown into the situation where we ALL had to work remotely, no one was prepared. The pandemic created demand for remote work that was unprecedented, unexpected, and impossible to support with existing infrastructures. Demands for collaboration tools like Cisco WebEx and Cisco WebEx Teams skyrocketed. Demands for secure access to corporate networks went through the roof. Cisco AnyConnect secure VPN services, Cisco DUO two factor authentication and Cisco Umbrella secure DNS service filled the secure access requirements.

We’ve now come to find that those foundational tools don’t provide the full remote work experience that you and I need as we transition into long-term remote work. We need access to all our applications and all our data. And it’s critical that the applications and data be in the same physical location for acceptable performance.

Enter Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or “VDI” for short. VDI has been around for a long time, as far back as the mid-80s. The technology is continuously evolving and improving. It’s considered a mainstream, virtually risk-free technology for supporting secure remote work. VDI is deployed at scales of 100,000 users or more at some of the largest organizations on the planet. It is also deployed at scales as low as 400 users, thanks to the economics of hyperconvergence.

VDI brings some very key benefits for remote work to organizations and end users:

Two of the challenges for bringing a VDI environment online in the past in your environment has been complexity and time to deploy. There is typically a fair amount of evaluation, analysis and planning that goes into a deployment upfront. Depending on the organization, that phase can take weeks or even several months depending on size. Then there’s the hardware design phase to support the VDI environment. Bills of Materials are built, considered, modified and finally settled on. By the time the design and infrastructure are settled on, the purchase order is cut, the equipment is delivered and installed, another month or so has gone by. At this point we usually start the VDI deployment.

The typical planning and hardware design phase take too long for the environment we are operating in. Recognizing this, in March 2020, the Cisco VDI and Graphic Solutions team created a program called Quick Ship. The intent was to pre-engineer Cisco UCS converged infrastructure and Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure options that could support a specified number of specific Microsoft Windows 10 virtual machines. Here is the Windows 10 Virtual Machine configuration the pre-engineered bundles support:

By using a target user Windows 10 VM configuration and the engineered Quick Ship UCS and HyperFlex bundles, we were able to eliminate the typical planning and hardware design phases.

That brought us to the VDI deployment phase. What we realized is that the deployment of the VDI system was a challenge for many customers.

Enter Rapid Deploy. We launched Rapid Deploy on August 24th to replace the Quick Ship program and address the deployment challenge. Rapid Deploy is built on the same tenants of eliminating the upfront planning and hardware design phases. What we added were offers from Cisco Customer Experience (CX,) formerly known as Cisco Advanced Services.

Rapid Deploy includes optional deployment service offers from Cisco CX for Citrix Apps and Desktops or VMware Horizon target user Windows 10 virtual desktops in increments of 500 or 1000 users. By utilizing the optional Cisco CX services offered in Rapid Deploy, a customer could go from their hardware and software order to a minimum 500 seat VDI environment in as little as a month.

We currently have 15 Rapid Deploy offers in our ordering tool that Cisco sellers and Cisco Partner sellers can leverage to build greenfield environments or add capacity to existing VDI environments. The offers can be created in less than five minutes by leveraging the solution identifier (SID) as the quote template. They can be customized to add more memory or NVIDIA GPUs.

Now customers can build out a highly performant, pre-engineered Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure or a Cisco UCS converged infrastructure and deploy the VDI infrastructure and virtual desktops in an amazingly short time!

Continue reading

Introducing the Cisco C240 SD M5 Server for the Performance Edge

Supporting applications at the edge with high-performance, easy to manage UCS C240 SD M5 Server

As more data and processing needs exist and are growing rapidly at the edge, providers and customers are exploring methods to avoid the bandwidth, latency, and overall costs of backhauling content to the traditional data center. Instead, the industry is moving towards enabling the more intense computational needs closer to where this data and content is gathered and presented.

According to IDC (1), 50% of new enterprise IT infrastructure deployed will be at the edge by 2023, and there will be an 800% increase in the number of apps at the edge by 2024. The industry is already looking for innovative methods to uniformly operate in this greatly scaled out environment.

We talked with many customers looking at these needs in areas such as service providers, hosting providers, enterprise branch, retail, defense, and many others, they have shared some common requirements:

◉ Solution optimized for a compact and tactical environment

◉ Simple on-boarding to management and orchestration tools by non-IT personnel

◉ Autonomous operations, with an ability for simple periodic updates

◉ Easy access and maintenance by non-IT personnel

◉ Performance that traditionally resides within today’s Data Center

◉ Enhanced security to operate within shared-use multi-access facilities

◉ Flexible options along with global 24×7 support

Cisco used these customer requirements to guide us as we developed a new UCS server platform for our customers. Our teams have been working hard on this problem and we are excited to announce the new Cisco C240 SD M5 server.

Introducing the Cisco UCS C240 SD M5

The Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 is available today and delivers a performance edge solution integrated with our Cisco Intersight offering to allow the same advantages in edge that existing Cisco customers consume in their data centers today.

The Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 delivers the following key capabilities for customers:

◉ Simplicity: Easy deployment and connection to network and power

◉ Turnkey: Simple onboarding into already defined policy

◉ Cloud or Virtual Appliance Managed: Simple Intersight claiming, Cloud or Connected/Private Virtual Appliance

◉ Economic: Match workload density needs to ratio’s only seen inside traditional DC with full performance – while fewer device touches and full Intersight management means reduced operational costs

◉ Future Proof: Standard peripherals and accelerators supported as rest of UCS line

◉ Agile: Intent based Intersight template definition of many edge sites from a single policy

◉ Complete Stack at Edge: When combined with HX and HXAP (both of which will be available late 2020 on the C240 SD M5) you have platform for full stack management to match storage, SD-WAN, servers, network all in a coordinated fashion

Optimized for a compact and tactical environment

The Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 is built for environments within and outside a traditional data center with some key points below. The C240SD M5 Server:

◉ Can be stacked up to 4 high without racking – or in 2 and 4 post racks

◉ Can be installed against rear wall with minimum 6” rear clearance

◉ Is just under 22” deep

◉ Can be powered by 120/240VAC or -48VDC

◉ Users can connect 2 nodes together directly with 10GE cable for workload live-migration

◉ Can be deployed with 1 or 2 Intel Xeon SP processors (configuration options will change)

◉ 24 DIMM slots supporting up to 256GB DDR4, or add 128/256/512GB PMEM modules to a maximum of 9TB

◉ 2-6 SAS/SATA/NVMe Drives, 2 M.2 Drives

◉ 2-6 PCIe slots (Gen3 with 2 x16, 4 x8)

◉ Will have future NEBS L3 qualification

◉ Unit has optional internal M.2 boot drives

◉ Has a tamper-evidence device that will raise alarms in multiple management systems

◉ FCS operation up to 10,000 ft, testing in progress to 13,000 ft

◉ FCS temp range from 10-40C, testing in progress to 50C (and peripheral options come into play)

◉ Shock in operation a 10g, and non-operational to 20g

Simple on-boarding to management and orchestration tools by non-IT personnel

In order to gain the advantage of remote installations without IT staff travel, Cisco has invested in methods to ease the onboarding of the C240 SD M5 both in situations where a pre-staging can be done, and also developing a low-touch deployment that will be allow direct shipments to remote sites. These methods will allow remote staff who have limited compute expertise to perform an installation of the Cisco edge solution. Some key elements include:

◉ Staging Intersight pre-claim today

◉ Intersight onboarding directly by non IT remote staff in near future

◉ Remote config setup, validation, and OS installation via policy

◉ Operational analytics

In summary the customer can stage at a partner today, units for global deployment, or in near future just deploy at these global locations with no staging required. All state to be installed on that server (config, options, OS/Hypervisor, Analytics, etc.) can be done not only remotely – but in the policy already defined within Intersight.

Autonomous operations, with an ability for simple periodic updates

In many of these types of edge deployments, having a model that is not connected to the cloud is a mandatory element. Cisco has many deployment models starting with simple stand-alone device management through our Cisco Integrated Management Controller that can be configured via multiple scripting and API methods. To take this further, based on our customer requirements we have developed the Intersight Connected Virtual Appliance which maintains a relationship with Cisco for real-time analytics and support, or the Private Virtual Appliance that has no connectivity back to Cisco. The latter provides isolation in the customer environment much like perpetual isolated software components common today.

To allow a capability of keeping updates for latest support and features ,the connected appliance can operate disconnected for up to 90 days – when the connection can be re-established, or in the case of the private appliance disconnected for same duration before customers are asked to update the appliance via a downloaded package.

Easy access and maintenance by non-IT personnel

The C240 SD M5 has a key advantage of all front access, where only rear components are the redundant fan modules. The components allow for easy replacement with easy access should maintenance be required.

Performance that traditionally resides within today’s Data Center

In many edge platforms today, the processing and peripheral/storage needs are much smaller for far edge points of the environment. Using those platforms to address the performance needs of hosting workloads, processing of data and video, transcoding, etc. are forcing higher processing and peripheral needs into the space between DC and edge. The Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 fits into that space and offers the performance of the full suite of most Intel Xeon SP models, Intel N3000 FPGA devices, nVidia T4 devices, up to 6 PCIe slots (2 x16), SAS/SATA or in combination with 6xNVMe.

As customers look to deploy SD-WAN solutions that include edge sites, methods to store large amounts of data where it is generated at the edge, process that data at the edge, our solution when combined with HyperFlex and HyperFlex Application Platform in the coming quarter will provide a full-stack solution to those locations with a single point of management and analytics.

Enhanced security to operate within shared-use multi-access facilities

As the data, business processing, and key Intellectual Property move outside the well-defended DC into these edge locations, the ability to secure these elements moves from an over the top add-in into a integrated strategy. Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 bases our security in our Cisco ACT2 technology that validates the hardware, the booting process, all firmware components up the stack. Cisco also supports Self Encrypting Drives in this solution, so that a unit will brick if removed. Cisco also includes tamper sensing within the solution that will allow central alarming.

Flexible options along with global 24×7 support

Customers we have talked with envision using the C240 SD M5 offering in combination of bare metal workloads, container workloads, standard virtual server hosting, Cisco HyperFlex solution, and more generally in a variety of storage heavy or PCIe dense deployments.

Cisco has multiple methods in the C240 SD M5 for sharing support information with Cisco TAC, including the fully connected TAC offering inside Intersight. All of the benefits of Cisco Intersight from an infrastructure automation and orchestration perspective are available to the C240 SD M5 at launch.

Customer Focused, Operate at Scale

Customers desire a platform for performance edge needs that is agile, simple, and economic. The new Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 delivers on that promise by providing a turn-key platform that is simple to deploy and operate and reduces the burden of IT staff. Future options for new acceleration technologies, driven by Intersight intent based policy and centrally managed will remove significant roadblocks to a modern performance edge. Operating at the scale of thousands or higher is much more straightforward with the UCS C240 SD M5 and Intersight together.

Continue reading

Modernizing to Oracle 19c with Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Oracle Database 19c is a long-term support release of the database, offering customers the best performance, scalability, reliability, and security for all their operational and analytical workloads. The core aim for 19c is stability, as it forms a foundation for next phase of autonomous database optimizations. These optimizations include the ability for the database to automatically create indexes, which allow for the database to self-optimize and maintain optimal configuration.

Additional optimizations in Oracle Database 19c include real-time statistics for all operations and the ability to automatically quarantine problematic sequel. It also includes key unique innovations for core enterprise capabilities. For a lot of customers who run standby databases, Oracle 19c accepts updates to those standby databases, thereby turning the standby from a read-only to a read-mostly asset. In order to deal with streaming data or to have IOT type workloads, 19c provides a new in-memory rows store and API to provide very high speed and high volume data ingest.

Below is the list of some of the new features in Oracle Database 19c:

◉ General – Flashback Standby database when primary database is flashed back
◉ Performance – SQL Quarantine
◉ RAC & Grid Infrastructure – Zero-Downtime Oracle Grid infrastructure patching
◉ Availability – Dynamically change Fast-Start Failover (FSFO) target
◉ Application Development – REST Enabled SQL Support
◉ Automatic Indexing
◉ Database IN-Memory
◉ REAL-TIME Statistics Collections
◉ High Availability

Oracle on A Hyperconverged Infrastructure

The rapidly emerging world of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) promises many technical and financial benefits. The marketplace has been quick to recognize and validate the advantages of HCI, which combines the main features of a three-tier architecture – compute, storage, and networking – into a single solution. Having superior, vendor-supplied software is crucial to facilitate easy and efficient management of resources. In addition to managing the essentials of compute, storage and networking layers, HCI solutions also provide features to handle DR and the ability to scale up, with additional nodes as needed.

For an Oracle customer, the benefits of HCI from a technical optimization perspective are clear. You reduce unused hardware capacity through better resource management, eliminate network devices, and scale up your Oracle deployments easily and rapidly in response to rising demand. Adding nodes and moving workloads becomes seamless.

Various considerations while choosing an HCI environment:

◉ A Simple, integrated software stack which allows to do more with less
◉ Consistent, high performance that satisfies demanding business critical applications
◉ Flexible deployment models that align IT expertise with business priorities
◉ Advanced automation capabilities that enable IT agility
◉ Hypervisors that offer confidence and lower risk

Cisco’s Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Businesses across all verticals are seeing benefits behind this tight integration with virtual technologies as well. HCI reduces complexity and fragmentation around having to manage resources sitting on heterogeneous systems; it can reduce data center footprints; and it can greatly reduce deployment risks with validated deployment architectures.

There’s clear demand in the market. Consider this: according to the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems report, “hyperconverged integrated systems will represent over 35 percent of the total integrated system market revenue by 2019.” This makes it one of the fastest-growing and most valuable technology segments in the industry today.

With a co-engineered hardware and software solution Cisco has become a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader in HCI with Cisco HyperFlex. Taking in all the considerations listed above while choosing an HCI environment, Cisco’s HyperFlex is a great solution and a great technology to consider while running oracle on. That said, there are numerous critical features that set this technology apart from any other HCI solution out there. One of those aspects revolves around the fact that HyperFlex comes with full network fabric integration. This type of integration allows administrators to create QoS policies and even manage vSwitch configurations that scale throughout the entire fabric interconnect architecture. This approach provides data reliability and fast database performance. Cisco HyperFlex integrates servers, storage systems, network resources, and storage software to provide an enterprise-scale environment for an Oracle Database deployment. This highly integrated environment provides reliability, high availability, scalability, and performance to handle large-scale transactional workloads.

Oracle Databases and Real Application Clusters (RAC) are the core of many enterprise applications, including online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing, business intelligence, report generation, and online analytical processing (OLAP). As the amount and types of data increase, you need flexible and scalable systems with predictable performance to address database sprawl. By deploying Cisco HyperFlex with All Flash or All NVMe nodes, you can run your Oracle Database and RAC deployments on an agile platform that delivers insight in less time and at less cost.

Cisco HyperFlex systems with Oracle Database and RAC:

◉ Closely match the needs of databases and applications
◉ Reduce Storage footprint
◉ Optimize storage costs
◉ Deliver predictable database performance
◉ Keep enterprise applications and database available

The first fully engineered hyperconverged appliance based on NVMe storage delivers more of what you need to propel mission-critical workloads:

◉ It provides 71 percent more I/O operations per second (IOPS) and 37 percent lower latency than our previous-generation all-flash node.
◉ Also provides 15% more storage efficiency due to less storage needed when using the Cisco HyperFlex Acceleration Engine.

All-NVMe solutions support the most latency-sensitive applications with the simplicity of hyperconvergence. Our solutions provide the first fully integrated platform designed to support NVMe technology with increased performance and RAS.

As mentioned above, Cisco HyperFlex systems best suites Oracle Database and RAC deployments, best performance at a cost of very low latency. To help you deploy Oracle 19c and Oracle RAC, we deployed Oracle 19c Database on a 4 node HyperFlex cluster and tested it with various configuration profiles. Below are the links to the Oracle whitepaper references containing validation results tested internally. From the test results, it’s clearly evident that Cisco HyperFlex systems can handle OLTP highly intensive workloads by delivering best performance at a very low cost and latency.

Continue reading

The SD-WAN Factor: Partnering for Success

Some partners resell Cisco products. Some go beyond selling and offer services. And some of them believe in the products so much, they use them internally. Such is the case with Katalyst, a certified Cisco Gold Partner and managed service provider; they do all three. I recently had a chance to speak with Jesse White, Field CTO at Katalyst, specifically about the benefits of Cisco’s SD-WAN solution, why they use it internally, how its white-label managed service offering is transforming its customers’ networks, SD-WAN Security, and more. It was a fantastic experience to learn first-hand, the power of this technology.

The “Katalyst” for Selecting Cisco SD-WAN

When Katalyst selects a new product to deploy, whether internally or at a customer site, there’s little room for error; getting it right the first time isn’t just important, it’s a must. Katalyst’s stringent decision criteria looks at a number of attributes, including management, ease of use, cost savings, programmability, stability, and more.

SD-WAN end-users realize better SaaS application performance, branch offices and acquisition sites are brought online in minutes rather than hours or even days, and businesses are seeing cost savings through the utilization of broadband links. IT teams are also seeing a huge benefit with a centralized console (vManage) that provides them with a comprehensive view of all devices and clients connected to the network. They can make configuration changes, add security policies, see the health of their links and much more directly from within vManage.

With a long history and vast experience working with Cisco ISR routers and leveraging Viptela SD-WAN, Jesse tells me it was the logical next step to deploy Cisco’s latest iteration of the solution that brings the two together. In fact, Katalyst has deployed the solution at a number of customer sites, both big and small, and across industries including financial, manufacturing, and retail. “Cisco SD-WAN has continued to be the clear winner for us,” Jesse says.

And Katalyst’s track record, together with Cisco, is able to drive change, and customers are taking notice. A recent IDC report states that, “Cisco holds the largest share of the SD-WAN infrastructure market, fueled by its extensive routing portfolio that is used in SD-WAN deployments…”

SD-WAN Tastes Pretty Good!

“Customer experience is at the center of what we do at Katalyst,” says Jesse. “There is no bigger priority for us.” To that extent, Katalyst follows the motto of ‘eating their own dog food’ or ‘sipping their own Champagne’, whatever vernacular you prefer. And that’s exactly what Katalyst did when it decided to implement SD-WAN on Cisco ISR routers across its offices in the Southeast, United States. “Our needs and applications are no different than that of our clients” says Jesse. Katalyst’s network and applications are distributed across multiple SaaS providers, with some residing on premise (they also make use of the Cisco Hyperflex HX platform) delivering on a true hybrid cloud approach.

“Cisco SD-WAN gives us the opportunity to leverage our investments and achieve our desired business outcomes,” says Jesse. “No longer do we have to discriminate against applications due to provider brownouts, our SD-WAN solution seamlessly finds the best path at the best time and orchestrates the desired outcome.” Pretty awesome if you ask me!

Simplifying SD-WAN

During our conversation, Jesse emphasized that customers are begging for simplicity and more importantly, more flexibility and control. And Katalyst has responded with a white-labeled Cisco-based SD-WAN managed service for its customers. In fact, many of Katalyst’s customers choose to deploy SD-WAN via the company’s managed service to reduce the complexities associated with in-house WAN deployments and accelerate access to cloud applications. The reasons are numerous and include cost savings, security enhancements, simplification and consolidation, lack of internal skills and or resources to manage it, expanding to multiple branches, and more.

“The commoditization the industry has experienced in the last half a decade has allowed our clients to strategically shift dollars from large private connectivity costs, into connectivity that is both smarter and closer to the final destination,” says Jesse. “This ultimately provides our own clients with a superior user and application experience.

SD-WAN Security

Lastly, we spoke about Cisco SD-WAN Security and the benefits associated with an integrated solution. The security aspects and integrations in Cisco SD-WAN are paramount for Katalyst’s customers that have highly secure environments — think financial and retail environments. “It’s a big driver for them to consume SD-WAN,” says Jesse. Integrated security features including Duo, Umbrella, Firewall, IPS, URL Filtering, AMP and more, mean Katalyst and its customers can leverage investments and integrations in protections they already have and are familiar with. This turns out to be a really big bonus for Katalyst and many of its customers.

“In our region alone,” says Jesse. “We are seeing more than 5,000 security positions going unfilled year after year, clients know they can’t compromise, and have to look for integrations and scalability.” This is where Cisco SD-WAN and Katalyst’s managed services solution really shine, by offering customers a no-compromise, scalable, and integrated solution.

Continue reading

Introducing the Cisco Intersight Mobile App for Data Center Visibility on the Go

With the tremendous customer adoption of Cisco Intersight, Cisco has now extended the reach of its Management-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform with the introduction of the Cisco Intersight Mobile App. The Intersight Mobile App provides a new intuitive view of Intersight managed systems, allowing users to keep an eye on what’s going on in their data center no matter where they are or what device they use.

The iOS version of the app is available now in the Apple App Store and the Android version will be available in the Google Play Store soon.

The new app provides on-the-go Health and Inventory detail for your Intersight-managed UCS and Hyperflex environment, so if a managed system’s health degrades to a point where an alarm is generated, the app will display relevant alarm detail. In addition, a comprehensive status of any Intersight-driven request can be monitored via the “Requests” dashboard.   Below we’re going to walk you through a series of screenshots with a few examples in the new app, so you see first-hand how easy it is to monitor your data center while you’re not in the office

How does it work?

The Intersight OpenAPI provides a REST-based, programmatic interface for accessing the Intersight Management Information Model that is representative of your compute environment. The App solicits this model through the API and returns a rich set of status-related details for UCS Servers, HyperFlex Clusters, and Fabric Interconnects. These details are then displayed in an easy to understand format within the App.

A quick peek at the appropriate dashboard can reveal Server, HyperFlex Cluster, or Fabric Interconnect views for your environment. These dashboards provide high-level roll-ups showing health, inventory, model, and alarm summaries.

How are my servers doing?

This dashboard is showing that there are 54 healthy systems on the Server Dashboard, with one showing up as critical. To investigate, simply select the red “Critical” hot link. Seeing that it’s C220, you can then select that server.

In this scenario, the app is showing an alarm indicating a problem with fan 1 in server 1. The user can then take this information, turn on the locator from the app and have one of the operators go and assess the situation.

HyperFlex Storage Capacity on the Go

Taking a closer look at the HyperFlex Dashboard and the HyperFlex “Top 5 Storage Utilization” summary on the bottom of the screen, it appears HX-SJC-01 has a capacity warning. Digging deeper into the HyperFlex Cluster Details for HX-SJC-01, it appears 61.8% of 110.6 TB is in use. This information tells the app user that they’ll need to keep an eye on the situation.

The Intersight App can also be used to monitor the progress of requests initiated through Intersight. For instance, if someone kicked off an OS installation on one of their C240 servers the previous day, they can see if – and how – that finished up. In the screenshot below it appears that the task is complete, and only took 38 minutes.

Here is a complete list of my current alarms.  There are several issues being flagged with varying levels of severity.  The alarms provide a level of visibility that enables IT teams to prioritize and be proactive in managing their infrastructure.

This is just the beginning for Intersight’s Mobile App. With this introductory version of the mobile app, users get:

◈ On-the-go health and inventory detail
◈ HyperFlex capacity detail
◈ Status and monitoring of Intersight-driven requests

Continue reading

Enabling Enterprise-Grade Hybrid Cloud Data Processing with SAP and Cisco – Part 2

In part 1 of this blog series I talked about how data processing landscapes are getting more complex and heterogeneous creating roadblocks for customer who want to adopt truly hybrid cloud data applications. In the beginning of this year, Cisco and SAP decided to join forces and to bring the SAP Data Hub to the Cisco Container Platform. The goal is to provide a real end-to-end solution to help customers tackle the challenges described above and enable them to become a successful intelligent enterprise. We are focusing on providing a turn-key enterprise-scale solution that fosters a seamless interplay of powerful hardware and sophisticated software.

Figure 1 Unified data integration and orchestration for enterprise data landscapes.

SAP brings into the game its novel data orchestration and refinery solution ‘SAP Data Hub’. The solution brings a number of features that allow customers to manage and process data in complex data landscapes involving on-premise systems and across multiple clouds. SAP Data Hub supports connecting the different systems in a landscape to a central hub to gain a first overview of all systems involved in data processing within a company. Above that the Data Hub is able to scan, profile and crawl those sources to retrieve the metadata and characteristics of the data stored in those sources. With that the SAP Data Hub provides a holistic data landscape overview in a central catalog and allows companies to answer the central questions about data positioning and governance.

Furthermore, the SAP Data Hub allows the definition of data pipelines that allow a data processing and landscape orchestration across all connected systems. Data pipelines consist of operators—small independent computation units—that form a joint computation graph. The functionality an operator provides can reach from very simple read operations and transformations (e.g. change the date format from US to EU), over interacting with a connected system, towards invoking a complex machine learning model. The operators are invoking their functionality and applying their transformations, while the data flows through the defined pipeline. This kind of data processing changes the paradigm of static, transactional ETL processes to a more dynamic flow-based data processing model.

With all of this functionality, we kept in mind that for being successful in bridging enterprise data and big data, we need to be open with respect to connecting not only SAP enterprise systems, but common systems used within the Big Data space (compare Figure 2). For this purpose, the SAP Data Hub is focusing on an open connectivity paradigm providing a huge number of connectors to different kinds of cloud and on-premise data management systems fostering the integration between enterprise data and big data.

All of that makes the SAP Data Hub a powerful enterprise application that allows customer to orchestrate and manage their complex system landscape. However, a solution like the Data Hub would be nothing without a powerful and flexible platform. Customers are increasingly turning towards containerized applications and Kubernetes as the orchestrator of choice, to handle the requirements to efficiently process large volumes of data. For this reason, it was a clear decision to move the SAP Data Hub also in this direction. The SAP Data Hub is completely containerized and uses Kubernetes as its platform and foundation.

Figure 2 SAP & Cisco delivering turn-key solutions for complex enterprise data landscapes.

This is where Cisco with its advanced Cisco Container Platform (CCP) on its hyperconverged hardware solution Cisco Hyperflex comes into the game. Providing elastically scalable container clusters as a single turnkey solution covering on-premise and cloud environments with a single infrastructure stack is key for enterprise customer involved in big data analytics. With the Cisco Container Platform on Hyperflex 3.0 Cisco offers a fully integrated and flexible ‘container as a service’ offering with lifecycle management for hardware and software components. It provides a 100% upstream Kubernetes with integrated networking, system management and security. In addition, it utilizes modern technologies such as ‘istio’ and ‘Cloud Connect VPN’ to efficiently bridge on-premise and cloud services from different cloud providers. Accordingly, it accelerates a cloud-native transformation and application delivery in hybrid cloud enterprise environments, clearly embracing the multi-cloud world and helping to solve the multi-cloud challenges. Furthermore, the CCP allows to monitor the entire hardware and Kubernetes platform to allow customers to identify issues and non-beneficial usage patterns pro-actively and troubleshoot container clusters with fast pace.

Accordingly, the CCP is the perfect foundation for deploying the SAP Data Hub in complex, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud customer landscapes. We complemented the solution with Scality Ring an enterprise-ready scale-out file and object storage that fulfills major characteristics for production-ready usage; e.g. guaranteed reliability, availability and durability. This adds a data lake to the on-premise solution allowing price-efficient storage for mass data. In addition, we added network traffic load balancing with the advanced AVI Networks load balancers. They provide intelligent automation and monitoring for improved routing decisions. Both additions greatly benefit the CCP and complete it towards a full big data management and processing foundation.

With the release of the SAP Data Hub on the Cisco Container Platform running on Hyperflex 3.0 and complemented with Scality Ring and AVI Networks load balancers during SAP TechEd Las Vegas, customers will have the option to receive a turn-key, full-stack solution to tackle the challenges of modern enterprise data landscapes. They can start fast, they remain flexible and they receive full-stack support from Cisco’s world class engineering support and SAP’s advanced support services. Accordingly, SAP and Cisco together enable customers to win the race for the best data processing in the digital economy.

Continue reading

Cisco Intersight: AI-Driven IT Operations Strategy

Cisco launched our cloud-based platform for AI-driven IT operations (a.k.a. AI Ops), Cisco Intersight, last September. It already delivers significant benefits, and we intend to take it to the next level with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

A New Era in Operations Management

“Work smarter, not harder” is critical to improving IT efficiency. Organizations are adopting a multicloud strategy, so you need scalable and consistent management across data centers, private clouds, edge, and branch environments. Cisco Intersight delivers this consistent management, automation and policy enforcement across a variety of servers and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). It helps you work smarter by delivering proactive support and actionable intelligence through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), so that you can proactively manage complex environments and reduce risk.

Traditional IT operations management tools are deployed on-premise, they are vendor and device focused, difficult to maintain, and have limited ability to scale. We introduced a new era of systems management with Cisco Intersight. It provides the simplicity of software as a service (SaaS) with unlimited scalability. Intersight is enhanced by AI and ML to provide users with actionable intelligence.

Requirements for AI Operations

Gartner introduced the concept of AI Operations (AI Ops) a few years ago. AI Ops should not be confused with AI systems, like the Cisco UCS C480 ML M5 we announced earlier this month. This definition:

AIOps platforms utilize big data, modern machine learning and other advanced analytics technologies to directly and indirectly enhance IT operations (monitoring, automation and service desk) functions with proactive, personal and dynamic insight. 

A recent IDC report also provides more information regarding AI-driven systems management.

Our product management teams looks at the requirements for AI Ops from a practical perspective. We try to offer functionality that will provide actionable insights and automation to simplify and enhance day to day operations. Something that we ask ourselves everyday is, how can Intersight make daily routines easier and faster across operations groups and teams? In order to achieve these objectives, we believe AI Ops needs to provide the following:

◈ Open automation to streamline routine processes

◈ Consistent management services across a wide variety of infrastructure

◈ Ability to proactively recognize problems and assist users to respond quickly

Open and Unified AI Ops

If your going to make it easier to work across teams, you have to provide an open framework for AI Ops. One of our competitors claims to deliver “AI for the data center”. However, the vendor’s platform currently supports only their storage products. Their strategy is vendor focused. When you read about their roadmap, the vendor only plans to support their systems. Customers use systems from a variety of vendors, so their marketing does not align with reality.

An open and unified framework is foundational. That’s why we designed Cisco Intersight to provide an open framework for AI Ops and infrastructure as a service. Intersight supports Cisco UCS and HyperFlex systems today, and we are working with partners to provide support for third party systems.

One of the reasons many IT processes are manual is because tools used by different teams have separate data stores and user interfaces. When you can aggregate data from a wide range of servers, fabric, storage and hyperconverged infrastructure, you have a common repository that is necessary for effective analysis. There are currently hundreds of thousands of devices connected to Intersight. The vast amount of data we are collecting is used with AI and ML algorithms to identify potential problems and provide users with actionable intelligence. We have integrated Intersight with Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) cognitive support, so we have can leverage their AI and ML capabilities as well as best practices.

The Four Benefits of AI Operations

As we continue to enhance Intersight and the Cisco management portfolio, our primary goal is to increase the customer benefits we can deliver through AI Ops. We have defined four categories of benefits:

1. Improved user experience

2. Proactive support and maintenance

3. Predictive operational analytics

4. Self-optimization of resources

Cisco is executing on our strategy to consistently enhance the customer benefits we deliver through AI Ops. We will be posting a series of blogs to explain how we are currently delivering the benefits in each of the four categories and our plans for the future.

Continue reading

Cisco UCS and HyperFlex for AI/ML Workloads in the Data Center

Data is the lifeblood of business. It helps drive deep insights and better decisions, improve processes, and offer a deeper understanding of customers, partners and business. Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) enables us to learn from data, identify patterns and make better decisions that augment human capabilities. This provides businesses new ways to grow revenue, attract and retain customers and become more operationally efficient. Further, AI/ML can help automate tasks as well as accelerate untapped insight in previously unexplored areas. Almost all industries in every sector from banking to healthcare and manufacturing are trying to take advantage of these benefits.

Continue reading

Hyperconvergence doesn’t get any easier

When it comes to managing hyperconverged infrastructure, simplicity is the key. Unfortunately, for many solutions the underlying infrastructure is inflexible and complex and so is cluster management. We designed Cisco HyperFlex Connect with three goals: to make it super easy to use; unify the management so you don’t have to switch between platforms to mange multiple clusters; and to make the interface smart and intuitive.

Continue reading

Cisco Hyperflex: The Time for HCI Compromise is Over

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) – it’s a bit of a mouthful but the truth is it’s not half as complicated as it sounds.

While the concept has only been mainstream for a few years, HCI is the fastest-growing segment of the market for integrated systems.

In fact, Gartner predicts it will grow from a niche industry in 2012 to a $5 billion industry by 2019[i], while a recent ESG Lab report states that 85% of businesses currently use, or are planning to use, HCI solutions.

Continue reading