Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for OpenStack: Enabling Reliable OpenStack Cloud for Enterprises

Companies are going through a change in the way they conduct their businesses and digital transformation is paving the way. IT services and applications are distributed and beyond the traditional boundaries of the data center. Cloud adoption is a big part of the transformation. Enterprises are looking at multiple cloud technologies from established and emerging players to handle the transformation.

More and more companies are adopting Fast IT as a standard to meet these challenges.  Dev and test teams are looking to shorten the development life cycle, and innovative cloud developers are looking for platforms that are programmatic and automatable. Companies are looking at flexible, open options to meet these needs in-house. OpenStack, is emerging as the leading open source cloud computing software platform and customers are actively considering it for their businesses.

OpenStack has come a long way in the last few years; the broad OpenStack community is delivering new features and capabilities rapidly. It has gained interest across various customer segments. However it continues to be a challenge for businesses to adopt OpenStack due to the skillset needed to design, optimize and deploy an OpenStack based cloud in their data centers. Another challenge is the support needed to maintain, troubleshoot and evolve with the industry.

Cisco Validated Designs and Implementation Guides offer proven processes and tested configurations that reduce the complexity of deploying OpenStack. Cisco works closely with ecosystem partners like Red Hat and Intel to develop validated solutions for standing up OpenStack based private clouds.

Earlier this year, we released ‘FlexPod Datacenter with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform,’ a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for running OpenStack on our trusted FlexPod architecture, composed of Cisco Unified Computing System, Cisco Nexus family of switches, and NetApp unified storage systems. For customers interested in running OpenStack with Ceph storage, another CVD is in the works.

Next week, we will release a new CVD jointly developed with Red Hat and Intel. The new validated solution combines the power of Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure with the most recent OpenStack distribution from Red Hat, so our customers can more easily and quickly deploy OpenStack private clouds.

Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure is a reliable, scalable industry-leading platform that matches the needs of an agile business. Cisco’s innovative solutions for stateless computing, programmability and automation are enabled within the context of OpenStack through easily available, open source plugins.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is a stable and tested distribution of OpenStack. OSP director is an integrated and centralized tool for deployment and management of OpenStack and Ceph.

Intel has made key contributions towards making OpenStack enterprise-ready such as support for live migration capability and scalability.

All the capabilities and features of Cisco UCS and contributions by Intel are delivered and deployed through Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 (OSP 7), for a seamless and stable experience. With this solution customers can manage compute, network, storage, hypervisors and virtual machines from the OpenStack environment. Our fundamental focus is to deliver an enterprise ready OpenStack platform solution with validated configuration, to increase speed of deployment and reduce risk.

For easy adoption of OpenStack, Cisco will be the single point-of-contact for installation and on-going support for the entire solution including the infrastructure and OpenStack . Cisco will work with Red Hat to provide coordinated support for faster resolution.

Simplifying OpenStack deployment is critical for the success of our customers and to ensure IT adoption of the technology; we are committed to delivering that to our customers with our eco-system partners.

Please join us at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo between Oct 27-29th to learn about the solutions we are building to address customer needs, our participation and contributions to OpenStack, or for any discussions on OpenStack.

Our Cisco Validated Design for deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform on Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure will be available for download in the Cisco Design Zone.