Modernize Workloads with Cisco UCS X-Series And Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Featuring Guest Blogger Oliver Walsdorf, UCS Product Manager at Cisco

Cisco Live US 2022

We are just a few days away from the biggest annual Cisco event for customers and partners, Cisco Live! After two years of taking our events digital, we’re excited to expand our community experience with a hybrid event – in-person and digital. With an emphasis on keeping apps running, we are helping customers and partners to be ALL IN this year at Cisco Live, working with you to solve some of your biggest IT challenges.

Hybrid Cloud

With a focus on keeping apps running, we know that organizations need an application modernization strategy that encompasses a hybrid-cloud platform with a proven infrastructure. Building a flexible, scalable architecture poised to support data-intensive workloads is key to a successful digital transformation strategy. Together with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, Cisco delivers an industry-leading solution specified for a variety of workloads, including databases and data cache, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Running and developing a mix of applications across the entirety of the hybrid cloud requires a diverse set of server types including blade and rack servers for the workloads of today and tomorrow.

Cisco UCS X-Series is flexible enough to run a pethora of application workloads running on Red Hat OpenShift. Our collaboration has resulted in a fully tested and validated Cisco Validated Design that combines Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with OpenShift Data Foundation on Cisco UCS X-series. With the addition of Ansible Automation Platform, faster, more consistent deployments delivering:

• Accelerated deployment with reduced risk: With the flexibility of both Cisco UCS X-Series and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation to scale-up or scale-out, organizations can easily expand their tier-1 applications and get unified data services to grow.
• Simplified cloud-operated Infrastructure: The move of management from network into the cloud with the Intersight cloud-operations platform optimizes Cisco UCS X-Series system resources to fit workload requirements. An intelligent visualization, optimization, and orchestration for all of the applications and infrastructure together with automation drives agility and consistency.
• A consistent user experience: Cisco UCS X-Series with Intersight and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deliver a consistent user experience, for both application developers, and your operations team. This consistency across platforms is essential to your hybrid and multi-cloud strategy.
• An adaptable system designed for modern applications:Adapt to the unpredictable requirements of modern applications. Consolidate onto a single platform that combines the density and efficiency of blade servers with the expandability of rack servers for better performance, automation, and efficiency.
• High performance for various storage classes and workloads: With Cisco UCS X-Series delivering high performance and Red Hat Ceph Storage providing block storage, a shared and distributed file system, and on-premises object storage, the solution provides various storage classes for on-premises or hybrid cloud workloads.

The Cisco UCS X-Series enables faster development and deployment of on-demand container-based applications and provides a platform ideal for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and OpenShift Data foundation (Figure 1). It scales in multiple dimensions—compute, storage, and network.

The Cisco Validated Design covers the details of the deployment of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and OpenShift Data Foundation running on Cisco UCS X-Series. The deployment of Cisco UCS X-Series is enhanced with Intersight Ansible and scales in various dimensions. The solution expands by adding additional nodes in your Cisco X-Series chassis. You also have the flexibility to extend your deployment outside of the Cisco X-Series chassis by adding more compute power with Cisco UCS X-Series or C-Series. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is then configured using the default deployment of three worker nodes but can scale by adding compute nodes as required. Similarly, as your data requirements expand, you can simply add OpenShift Data Foundation nodes to your cluster.

Powerful Combination

This powerful combination of Cisco UCS X-Series with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and OpenShift Data Foundation provides developers and IT organizations with a complete hybrid cloud application platform. Both new and existing applications and workloads can be deployed on secure, scalable resources with minimal configuration and management overhead resulting in better performance, automation, and efficiency. It keeps your apps running.

Attending Cisco Live

If you are planning to visit the in-person Cisco Live event in Las Vegas, please stop by and take a look at the Cisco UCS X-Series. We would love to chat about how we can help with your application modernization challenges. While you are there, visit Red Hat at booth #1338 in the World of Solutions. Cisco and Red Hat will be presenting this in the Mini-Theater, and we’re delighted to have the chance to meet with you!

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