Red Hat and Cisco bring Application Policy to OpenStack environments

On January 13, 2015, Cisco will celebrate a year of industry adoption of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), a ground breaking SDN architecture. It will include a public webcast with ACI customers and ecosystem partners describing a range of new solutions that dramatically simplify data center and cloud deployments . One of these inaugural partners was Red Hat, the leading provider of open source solutions for enterprise IT . Since the ACI launch, Cisco and Red Hat have been working on extending the application policy model, at the heart of Application Centric Infrastructure, to OpenStack. Here is a preview of the Red Hat solution.

Cloud deployments of new mobile, social, and big data applications need a dynamic infrastructure to support higher demand peaks, more distributed users, varying performance needs, 24×7 global usage, and changing security vulnerabilities. These applications need a mix of virtualized and dedicated “bare-metal” resources, to run economically at scale with performance and availability.

To meet these needs, Cisco, Red Hat and other companies, have jointly developed Group Based Policy – a common open policy language that expresses the intent of business and application teams separately from the language of the infrastructure. Group Based Policy offers continuous policy governance while applications are deployed, scaled, recovered and managed for threats. It is ideal for rapidly deploying elastic, secure applications through OpenStack such as CRM, eCommerce, big data, financial reporting, and corporate e-mail.

IT organizations can get several benefits:

o   Dramatically accelerate deployment of business applications and services through OpenStack.

o   Maintain enforcement of business and application policies during frequent changes to scale, tenants, and the infrastructure.

o   Simplify DevOps Release Automation – moving application changes to production.

o   Ideal for hybrid cloud – Preserve user-intent and business policies across different infrastructures.

o   Prevent shadow IT – empowers internal IT to match the agility of the public cloud while complying with corporate controls .

Network administrators can get additional benefits when Group Based Policy is combined with the full capabilities of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, including seamless management of heterogeneous infrastructure, policy based network automation, real-time troubleshooting and performance optimization.

Group Based Policy (GBP) is implemented through a new APIC Group Based Policy plug-in for OpenStack Neutron, the networking service. Since networking connects all compute and storage end points in the data center, it is possible to define groups of endpoints through Neutron that share the same application requirements, regardless of how they are connected.  In addition, GBP:

Captures dependencies between applications, tiers and infrastructure so that respective teams can evolve underlying capabilities independently.

Works with multiple SDN controllers and extensible to multi-hypervisor infrastructures.

Brings application policy-based provisioning to existing networking plug-ins.

Group Based Policy will be available and supported in the upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6. Learn more about Group Based Policy here. And register for Cisco’s webcast on January 13th.