Cisco, Red Hat extend networking, AI integrations

Cisco and Red Hat are once again expanding their 15-year-old strategic partnership, this time to bolster networking, AI and cloud integrations. At the Red Hat Summit 2024 next week, the two vendors will demonstrate how tightly integrating Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) with Red Hat’s OpenShift can help customers improve their network operations.

Cisco ACI implements the company’s software-defined networking (SDN) technology, designed to automate data center and cloud network infrastructure via software-based policy models and centralized management, according to Cisco. 

“The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is an enterprise-grade platform as a service based on Kubernetes that enables Enterprise customers to adopt container technology to develop and run applications,” according to a Cisco white paper on the package. “Most organizations that adopt Red Hat OpenShift require enterprise-grade network and security [and] also face challenges when connecting newly developed applications with other environments such as enterprise databases, data warehouses, big data clusters, mainframes or applications running in legacy virtualization technologies in general.”

Integrating ACI and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides a single, programmable network infrastructure that eliminates bottlenecks between OpenShift workloads and the rest of the infrastructure while providing enterprise-grade networking and security, Cisco says.

“This approach also improves security through flexible microsegmentation. Additionally, we will have a new demo featuring Lightspeed-ACI, which automates the creation of Ansible playbooks for ACI, accelerating network operations,” wrote Todd Brannon, product management senior director, Cisco compute, in a blog about the recent enhancements.

As for AI, the companies will introduce Cisco Validated Designs (CVD) for genAI use cases, according to Brannon. They include:

• How to run genAI tasks such as inferencing over converged infrastructure with Nvidia GPUs, the Nvidia AI Enterprise Software Suite, VMware vSphere, and OpenShift. These CVDs support continuous integration (CI) architectures for both NetApp FlexPod with NetApp Astra Trident and FlashStack with Pure Storage Portworx for persistent storage. These validated designs also highlight sustainability capabilities featuring Cisco UCS Power and Energy Metrics Dashboard. 
• A genAI inferencing CVD features the Intel 5th Generation CPU, Intel OpenVINO toolkit, VMware vSphere, OpenShift, and OpenShift AI. This design guide shows how OpenShift Data Foundation users can utilize local storage in Cisco UCS servers for simplified operations. 
• Another CVD is for streamlining machine-learning operations with OpenShift AI on FlashStack with Nvidia GPUs to operationalize and accelerate model delivery with consistency and efficiency. 

“AI is pushing traditional infrastructure to its limits due to its massive datasets, specialized algorithms, and process orchestration requirements,” Brannon wrote. “Given the critical nature of the datasets and the business processes AI is being deployed to improve, IT teams are faced with significant considerations around security and infrastructure scalability to support the inevitable growth.”

As for improving cloud integration, the vendors said customers can now extend OpenShift applications to run on bare metal Cisco Unified computing System (UCS) servers. The idea is that customers can now simplify operations by eliminating the hypervisor layer to run cloud-native workloads, Brannon stated. “This helps reduce overall infrastructure costs while increasing resource utilization. With OpenShift Virtualization, legacy applications can run in VMs that can be created, managed, cloned, and live-migrated next to containerized workloads on bare-metal Cisco UCS,” Brannon wrote.

A bare-metal architecture also offers more direct hardware access, maximizing performance for demanding workloads such as high-performance computing, AI, or other latency-sensitive applications, according to Brannon.

The latest enrichments are part of a long history of developments between Cisco and Red Hat. For example, the vendors have an offering that lets customers more easily turn up and manage bare-metal containerized workloads by integrating Cisco’s cloud-operations management platform, Intersight, and Red Hat OpenShift Assisted Installer, which controls OpenShift clusters, to handle the complex and time-consuming process of networking a containerized environment.

In addition, the two companies have a package that lets customers utilize Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform and Cisco’s network infrastructure to support network automation capabilities. This includes automating tasks like network device inventory reporting, event-driven automation for network management, network backup and restore, and extending automation to remote branch networks, according to Cisco.

Yet another collaboration has resulted in a Cisco Validated Design that combines Red Hat OpenShift with OpenShift Data Foundation on Cisco UCS X-series.

“Together, Cisco and Red Hat are dedicated to reducing the complexity of data center operations to help our customers deploy business-critical workloads across on-premises or multicloud environments in a consistent manner,” Brannon stated.