Today data center customers are rolling out newer trends and technologies at a rapid pace. SaaS, DevOps, and migration to Cloud are disruptions that mandate a robust networking technology to deliver on the promise of innovation. To manage this complex environment, customers are seeking an enterprise approach to DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI) for centralized visibility and control over networks that span geographical boundaries. With an enterprise DDI strategy, network teams can deliver flexible infrastructure to developers, reducing operating costs and security risks. In this blog, we will review highlights of the BlueCat Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) joint solution that we announced this week at Cisco Live Orlando and how it empowers network teams implement and enterprise DDI strategy.
As a precursor to the solution, let us review key value-props of ACI and BlueCat offerings. (ACI) is an innovative policy-based architecture that radically simplifies, optimizes, and accelerates the entire application deployment lifecycle. With tight integration between physical and virtual elements, an open ecosystem model, ASIC’s, hardware, and software, ACI’s common policy-based operating model delivers true application agility while drastically reducing complexity. BlueCat DNS Integrity represents a design philosophy centered on best practices network architectures that are centralized and automated, delivering core DNS, DHCP and IPAM services rapidly and without compromise.
Cisco ACI and BlueCat DNS Integrity products are built on the same fundamental principles: automation, policy-driven, agile and scalability and hence it made a compelling case to build a solution for our joint customers- BlueCat integrated with Cisco ACI to deliver customers an enterprise DDI strategy. The solution broadly covers two major customer use-cases: Centralized visibility (available now) and IP enabled device management and operational care-about (roadmap).
The solution leverages Cisco ACI’s and BlueCat’s open API to provide our customers with centralized visibility by feeding endpoints information from ACI into BlueCat Address Manager with the ability to map and annotate in BlueCat DNS Integrity, and the entire subnet tree to the granularity of Tenant/App Profile/BD/Subnet Hierarchy.
Further to strengthen the integration, we are currently exploring use cases to add additional context of DNS resources directly in the ACI’s UI delivering deep insights & operational flexibility to ACI admins.
Integration Use-case showcased at the world of solutions
The joint solution featuring visibility use case will be showcased at BlueCat demo booth #1919, in the world of solutions, during June 11-14, at Cisco Live Orlando.
Embedded here is a Video that captures the integration.
We want to share exciting, forward-looking news with our joint customers. The ACI-BlueCat integration code snippets will be available on Github later this year coinciding with the solution GA.
Related Links
BlueCat Blog: Click Here
Wow!!! The blog post and associated ACI / BlueCat integration prototype video provides an outstanding solution to a problem that consistently proves to be a pain point for operations teams.
I look forward to seeing the integration code snippets on Github.
In the meantime, where can I find more information regarding the APIs for both Cisco ACI and BlueCat DNS Integrity?
Thanks!
Hi Vincent
Thanks for the kind words. You can find information on ACI's REST API's here: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/2-x/rest_cfg/2_1_x/b_Cisco_APIC_REST_API_Configuration_Guide.html