Hybrid cloud networks are calling – Cisco Nexus Dashboard has the answer

The scale and complexity of modern enterprise infrastructure environments are exploding as workloads become pervasive and infrastructure becomes more hybrid and distributed across data centers, edge, and public cloud resources. Recent events have put the importance of successful network operations at the forefront. Through a barrage of obstacles, today’s resilient and successful organizations are modernizing and automating their network operations to stay ahead of the curve. Their destination? Hybrid Cloud — and by a vast majority.

According to IDC research, 55% of organizations currently have hybrid cloud and use it as a framework to deploy applications where scale-out architecture and high availability networks are needed. Another 29% reported not having a hybrid cloud, but they planned to create one within a year. And by 2025, 70% of organizations will modernize their applications based on drivers like data security, organizational flexibility and agility, and productivity gains versus drivers like IT cost savings.

To solve hybrid cloud application complexity, your IT needs to focus on automating application infrastructure management. This includes the many personas involved in configuration, provisioning, lifecycle operations, and orchestration of cloud and hybrid datacenter environments. But scaling applications into hybrid cloud also increases the cost of managing thousands of distributed devices, containers, and network services. These elements require more knowledge and more time to troubleshoot the many interconnected parts using multiple purpose-built solution tools and methods.

To be successful, it’s critical to have the visibility and insights into your network wherever your data is created with consistent network and policy orchestration across multiple data centers —whether on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. At Cisco, we know that for any move to the hybrid cloud lifecycle journey, there is an uncompromising need for a centralized approach to manage network capabilities. Cisco’s Nexus Dashboard is our newest cloud networking platform innovation to help with this very problem. With its One View presentation of all your hybrid cloud network sites, your IT operators can use a single agile platform, to operate all their network infrastructure in a single place. How many split personas (NetOps, DevOps, SecOps, and CloudOps) do you have? Cisco Nexus Dashboard bridges all the tools needed by each persona with a flexible operational model for all use cases on a single platform.

Figure: Cisco Nexus Dashboard: Centralized hybrid cloud networking platform

We listened, here are the recent innovations that you asked for:

Bolster Cloud Neutral Support

Recent innovations include expansion to the hybrid cloud with added support for Google Cloud, simplifying network management across multiple public cloud sites. Nexus Dashboard is available in the AWS and Azure marketplaces and will also be featured in the Google Cloud marketplace.

Improved Intelligence and Site Management

Key new features support air gap environments, provide simplification of experience such as reduced app downtime due resource challenges when upgrading an app or installing by determining whether you have enough resources etc. The dashboard will predetermine the resources needed for the app and environment to run smoothly.

With air gap support, customers that are not connected to Cisco Cloud can utilize insights advisory features to better identity risks to their infrastructure and get decrypted updates on PSIRTS, EOS/EOL, field notices etc. Syslog support as well as customization and personalization features are newly available with the interface.

Decreased Dependence on Physical Hardware

Additional scale improvements are being implemented with the virtual form factor of Nexus Dashboard, where additional physical hardware is not required to run the Nexus Dashboard in your environment. Please refer to the Nexus Dashboard datasheet for more details.

End to End Visibility

External devices such as firewalls and integrations such as vCenter – offer broader visibility, correlated telemetry and deeper insights beyond the core network. For end-to-end visibility, it is imperative to additionally understand where exactly the problem truly lies, which allows for quick remediation. L4-L7 and cross-domain integrations are a key strategy to gain comprehensive visibility. With the new vCenter integration, the Insights function can incorporate virtualized workload data such as hypervisor name, VM name, VM health into telemetry. This will enable visibility across silos, into the virtualized environments and enable faster MTTR for customers by correlating network events and application issues.

The Insights function is also able to enable optimal network and application performance and ensure continuous availability with recent AppDynamics SaaS support.

Considering recent news of companies that have implemented changes resulting in outages, we’d like to emphasize that pre-change validation with upgrade assist are key capabilities of the Insights function. It’s a critical capability that evaluates configuration changes before they are deployed to allow IT Ops to make changes with confidence. This removes unintended consequences that take down applications and/or the network. I encourage you to check out these Nexus Dashboard capabilities.

Which performance zone is right for you?

Customers have different reasons as to operate in the various performance zones (be it OKRs, metrics, speed of the business or foundational capabilities) in terms of the people, process, and technology alignment.

With the Nexus Dashboard, we are helping customers figure out where in the network infrastructure automation journey they are. Then help them in their journey to move their performance zone from reactive, to proactive and then to optimizing and the visionary self-healing, self-driving, and self-diagnostic networks.

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco UCS and Cisco MDS

Better together

At a concert, few years ago, the director spoke to the audience and said something that resonated in my mind for long time. His words went like this: the value of the ensemble is greater than the sum of the value of the individual musicians. The meaning was clear. He wanted to illustrate the significance of playing together, as an orchestra, rather than a group of individual sound musicians.

The same concept comes to my mind when I think of the combination of Cisco UCS, and Cisco MDS 9000 storage networking. You can use them independently, or connected to other products. But the combination of Cisco UCS and Cisco MDS delivers unique benefits that exceed the sum of the individual products. The pseudo-mathematical formula 1+1=3 can well express the concept. Alternatively, another way to describe it is the prosaic expression “better together”.

Cisco UCS + Cisco MDS synergy: 1+1=3

The joint adoption of Cisco UCS compute systems and Cisco MDS 9000 Series of storage networking switches provides a significant benefit to the enterprise. Over the years, I have collected information from the many customer opportunities I have been directly involved in. When reflecting on that, I identified a list of synergies and benefits coming from the joint adoption of Cisco UCS with Cisco MDS 9000. I also discovered those benefits can be grouped into three main categories: advanced design options, easier management and better support.

Key advantages

◉ Multiprotocol flexibility allows organizations to deploy Fibre Channel and FCIP on a single chassis and more easily benefit from the advantages of both technologies. Support for SCSI, NVMe and FICON protocols is also available. Moreover, you have the advantage to be fully covered under a Cisco verified solution.

◉ VSANs can logically segregate storage traffic and create multi-tenancy, and they are supported in the Fibre Channel fabric and within Cisco UCS. This capability is only available from Cisco.

◉ VSAN trunking allows the use of the same link for carrying traffic from multiple VSANs, reducing the need for multiple links while segregating traffic. This is a unique Cisco capability.

◉ F-port PortChannels provide link aggregation of multiple Cisco UCS to Cisco MDS 9000 physical links into a single logical channel, as well as fault tolerance and uniform traffic load balancing. This capability is only available from Cisco.

◉ NVMe/FC can boost application performance by reducing latency and minimizing CPU usage for data transfer activities. You also have the advantage to be fully covered under a Cisco verified solution.

◉ Common Operating System and management tools ease network implementation, maintenance, and troubleshooting by relying on the same skill set across SAN, LAN, and computing environments. This is a unique Cisco capability.

◉ Cisco UCS visibility from Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller allows a single view for all networking elements in a Cisco data center architecture, including Cisco UCS fabric interconnects and server vNICs and vHBAs. This capability is only available from Cisco.

◉ Cisco Intersight integration covering both compute and storage networking provides lifecycle management of Cisco UCS servers, as well as Cisco Nexus 9000 and Cisco MDS 9000 products. This is a unique Cisco capability.

◉ Cisco Intersight Cloud Orchestrator can be used to automate different technology domains with an easy-to-use and low-code workflow designer, enabling IT operations teams to move at the speed of the business. This is a unique Cisco capability.

◉ Smart Zoning reduces the need to implement and maintain large zone databases and eases management and implementation tasks. You also have the advantage to be fully covered under a Cisco verified solution.

◉ Assured interoperability and feature compatibility, avoiding tedious compatibility matrix verification and deployment delays. This capability is only available from Cisco.

◉ Organizations can interact with a single vendor when troubleshooting problems across computing and networking environments. This is a unique Cisco capability.

◉ A variety of support models are available across data center solutions to efficiently manage and coordinate partners to resolve problems. This capability is only available from Cisco.

Key business benefits

When we consider the business implications of the advantages listed above, we can discover that Cisco UCS plus Cisco MDS 9000 integrated solution delivers:

◉ Operational savings from hassle-free firmware upgrades, solution automation with Cisco Intersight and operational simplification with smart zoning

◉ Increased uptime with Cisco support and a single pane of glass for unified visibility, combined with deep traffic analysis and proactive troubleshooting

◉ Application performance improvements from uniform traffic load balancing on uplinks and NVMe/FC end-to-end support, all combined with congestion prevention with MDS 9000 DIRL software.

In short, the Cisco MDS 9000 Series provides superior performance, high availability, and intelligent storage networking for Cisco UCS environments in small, medium and large organizations.

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO): The maestro of the network

Orchestrate your multi-fabric and multicloud network simply

In any symphony you need a good maestro to help orchestrate all the different instruments to produce a harmonious sound.  Everything must be in time and to the beat.   It is the same with your networks.  When running multiple fabrics both on premise, private clouds or public clouds, you need a maestro or orchestrator as well that can be automated and help manage the network and security policies across vast landscapes.

Since it’s early days, Cisco’s Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO) has been that maestro, allowing network administrators, engineers and cloud operators work together harmoniously to provide a fast, safe and agile network.  We have new versions of NDO, release 3.5 and release 3.6 which will help you build your network capabilities, provide greater ease of use and enhance your security across multiple network fabrics.

What is Cisco NDO

NDO provides consistent network and policy orchestration, scalability, and disaster recovery across multiple data centers through a single pane of glass while allowing the data center to go wherever the data is.

NDO allows you to interconnect separate Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI®) sites, Cisco Cloud ACI sites, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC) sites, each managed by its own controller (APIC cluster, NDFC cluster, or Cloud APIC instances in a public cloud). The on-premises sites can be extended to different public clouds for hybrid-cloud deployments while cloud-first installations can be extended to multi-cloud deployments without on-premises sites. In addition, Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator can be deployed through the Cisco Nexus® Dashboard, which provides a single automation platform to access the data center network’s operational services and tools.

The single-pane network interconnect policy management and the consistent network workload and segmentation policy provided by NDO allows monitoring the health of the interconnected fabrics, enforcement of segmentation and security policies, and performance of all tasks required to define tenant intersite policies in multiple sites through an easy to manage user interface.

What’s New?

NDO is always evolving to meet the needs of the ever-growing hybrid cloud world.  So, what is new now?   Recently Cisco launched NDO release 3.5 and 3.6 which incorporates several enhancements to help orchestrate consistent networks across multi-fabric and multicoud environments.

Key NDO 3.5 Enhancements: 

• BGP for underlay peering with ISN –
• This provides support peering spines with the ISN devices using BGP adjacencies.  It simplifies ISN connectivity using BGP only.
• External connectivity from Cloud Sites
• This allows you to establish external connectivity between Cloud CSRs and external devices with IPsec & BGP, which provides access to cloud resources from external networks (Branch, Campus, Co-lo, Internet)
• Show DCNM object fault info from all sites
• Scalability improvement of 12 DCNM sites

Key NDO 3.6 Enhancements: 

• Configuration drift reconciliation workflow for APIC and NDFC provides:
• NDO workflow that synchronizes and merges any policy config discrepancies/changes made in APIC or NDFC level.
• Ease of Use Improvements
• Scalable static port binding with leaf/port range provisioning
• Bulk update workflow for template objects
• NDO Cloud Enhancements allows:
• Google Cloud connectivity
• Multi-cloud inter-site connectivity between AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Sites
• Partial mesh EVPN-VXLAN connectivity between on premises and AWS and Azure cloud sites
• Workload connectivity for multicloud without policy
• Proxy support for cloud sites
• SD-Access Campus (DNAC) and ACI Integration – Macro-Segmentation includes automating:
• Connectivity of Campus VN to access DC VRF
• Internet access for Campus VNs through ACI
• Visibility of VN-VRF extension and connectivity status
• NDFC 12.0(2) support

With all these updates customers can continue to enjoy simple orchestration across hybrid cloud environments all through the single interface of the Nexus Dashboard.

Source: cisco.com

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Attaining Business Resiliency with Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights

Identifying and Resolving Issues

IT teams require end-to-end visibility to ensure business critical applications are accessible and running effectively. But they often struggle with siloed processes and juggling multiple tool-sets to manage and monitor the network. They also need to ensure the network configuration is compliant with the established business intent. Cisco just released Nexus Dashboard 2.1.2 and Nexus Dashboard Insights 6.0.2 that addresses these issues and enables IT to identify and quickly resolve issues that ultimately enhance workforce productivity and efficiency.

It is often difficult to understand where issues lie in the network. Is it the physical devices, the endpoints, the applications, or the configurations—or possibly something else? Having this lack of knowledge increases the troubleshooting complexity as well as the time it takes to locate pain points.

Nexus Dashboard Insights 6.0 brings innovative One-Click Remediation, with which IT can identify issues in a single dashboard and resolve them with—literally—the click of a button. For example, as shown in the following screenshot, there is an anomaly with an access-entity profile that’s not associated to any of the domains. This issue will have a major impact into the network and applications for the workforce.

To fix this type of problem, NetOps needs to login to the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and check the application profiles, domains, and cross-check numerous places to make sure it won’t impact any other connections. However, the new One-Click Remediation feature provides NetOps with a diagnostic report and a “fix button” that will immediately resolve the issue. This dramatically reduces the amount of time and steps to identify and resolve an issue.

IT also needs to support business-critical applications by ensuring they are compliant with business intent and security policies. The new Compliance and Pre-Change Analysis features in Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights provides a proactive approach to ensure configurations are properly setup to ensure applications are meeting the company’s business intent.

For example, a company may have a standard policy to prevent traffic from an internal server to the Internet. IT can create an applicable compliance requirement (shown in screen below) to be notified if the server begins communicating with the internet.

If there is a traffic between the internal server and the internet, then IT will receive a CRITICAL traffic restriction violation based on the compliance policy. IT can then analyze the anomaly to see what configuration is incorrectly allowing the traffic flow. In this example there is a contract allowing the traffic between the internal server and the internet. The new compliance feature enables IT to be proactive and identify issues before they start becoming a threat.

As part of Nexus Dashboard Insights new features, the Pre-Change Analysis enables IT to fix this specific traffic violation issue (by deleting the contract) and to ensure this won’t cause any other issues. Using the Pre-Change Analysis, IT can test the proposed configuration change and evaluate its impact on the network prior to committing any network changes. The following screen shows an example of deleting an existing contract between the internal server and the internet.

IT can also identify if there are any potential issues with a particular configuration change by looking at a snapshot of the current configuration and comparing it with the proposed configuration. IT can also look at all the resources that will be affected by this proposed change.

As shown in the following figure, the compliance requirement is met with the proposed change. IT can confidently make the change and know that there will be no negative impact on the network. With these Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights features, IT can quickly and easily fix an issue to meet a compliance requirement for their business-critical applications, as well as validate the outcomes of the fix through Pre-Change Analysis before implementing the configuration.

Insights for Network Resiliency

At any point of time, IT strives to maintain network resiliency to securely meet the goals of business operations. Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Nexus Dashboard Insights provides the visibility, trust, and tools that IT needs to be successful. Learn more details about Nexus dashboard Insights from our Resource links below.

Source: cisco.com

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