BlueXP is now NetApp Console
Monitor and run hybrid cloud data services
Hey there. Have you seen a flex pod setup? If you have, then you have an understanding of how many components it contains and how complex each configuration can be. Do you have an understanding of all those components or if all those components are compliant together? Now, from a partnership between Cisco and NetApp, you can visually see if your whole Flex Pod environment is compliant. Let's take a look at just how this works. First, we'll look at the individual parts of the solution. Cisco insight provides the manageability and view into the FlexPod switch and host infrastructures. Unifi Manager provides Intersight with the access to the FlexPod storage, access to its extensive monitoring, alerting, and analytical capabilities, and a solutionsbased access to IMT. The NetApp interoperability matrix tool contains all the tested and supported configurations for FlexPod. Next, let's see how all these pieces work together to provide a holistic compliance view. As mentioned before, Innersight has the knowledge to discover both the switches and host information from the Flex Pod. It talks directly to UniFi Manager, which in turn talks to the multiple NetUP storage arrays in the Flex Pod. This allows insight to build a full flex pod representation. To check compliance across the whole flex pod, insight sends this representation to unify managers IMT solutions API. The API translate the Cisco data into IMT supported format [music] and then goes to work on checking with IMT. For security reasons, UniFi Manager must request a security token to be able to communicate with IMT. Unifi Manager then takes the full solution and breaks it up into individual IMT API requests. One solution could have n* n number of IMT requests.Once all the responses come back, UniFi manager will coales the compliance for each component and translate the results back into Cisco data. Finally, Insight can request the data and display it for the customer. The data that UniFi Manager and IMT are providing will allow a customer to understand exactly which components of their flex pod are compliant and which ones are not. Here is a sample application showing the results from a flex pod configuration that has 12 hosts on a B series USC running ICE across two different ONAP clusters. One running on tap 9.6 and one running on tap 9.7. From here, I can quickly see that 12 of the hosts are compliant across their operating stack, but office site 2010 has a configuration issue. It looks like the firmware on the fabric interconnect has not been tested in IMT, so it's not supported. So, with this tight integration across Cisco Intersight, UniFi Manager, and IMT, a customer can quickly validate their flex pod configurations.
The NetApp Interoperability Matrix Tool (IMT) allows customers to understand which components of their FlexPod are compliant through the tight integration between Cisco Intersight, Unified Manager, and the IMT.