BlueXP is now NetApp Console
Monitor and run hybrid cloud data services
Welcome to this uh short session. Um my name is Sudesh. I'm VP of innovation and emerging technologies at E+. Um just to give you a background of mine um I used to work for Cisco for 11 years 2000 to 2011 and then uh I worked a little bit in Salesforce and then I started uh my own company which is one cloud consulting which got acquired by E+ and I'm here with E+. Hey, thank you all for coming. So today what we're going to talk about is mostly around um flex pod and how interite works on top of flex pod. Okay. Um we have uh deployed this at various customers, large enterprises and whatnot. Um and let me [clears throat] get into the agenda. First I'll be introducing some innovations around flexpot. What is uh Cisco Interite is? What are some of the features uh around interite? Um what is the architecture? um and what are some of the interite orchestration capabilities and our uh E+ capabilities. Now you'll be thinking hey can I do this in 15 minutes? Yes and I'll try to right.Solet's jump right into the content. So if you have any questions please you know you can they asked me to put it at the end but I like to be very interactive so you can ask at any point of time. First is um from a flexot perspective, it is a very um innovative solution. Um it's a versatile solution which can run a wide variety of workloads, right? Um it's uh worth noting that Flexbot has been running over a decade in large enterprise customers, right? Um and also another [clears throat] key point of flexot is its uh repeatable building blocks. Okay, blocks. Okay, blocks. Okay, it's actually really easy to design, deploy and manage the Flexbot in a large enterprise uh environment, right? Um it also has end to end every component in Flexbot has orchestration capabilities which we'll get into uh later. It is secure, smart and sustainable. Right? What do you mean by uh secure? Actually itis a very well every component within flexot like compute network storage as the security features which uh protects against modern threats. It protects against ransomware network threats etc. Right? From [clears throat] a smart perspective it has the capability to deliver uh quickly design and deploy flex part. From a sustainability perspective, Cisco and NetApp reports to ESG, right? Thereby they what they do is they create these modular switches, right? Orany storage switches whatever, right? Um and it's very sustainable thereby reducing your environmental waste. Anybody has worked on Interite here? Okay, couple of them. Do you know what Interite does? It is pretty much a cloud operational platform. What do you mean by that? Right. It provides intelligent visibility,right? It provides end to end orchestrational capabilities across your on-prem and cloud environments. All right.It is actually provides faster delivery, simplified operations and continuous optimization. What do you mean by that? What do you mean by simplified uh faster delivery for example, right? So for example on a flexbot if you want to deploy uh Kubernetes okay it takes weeks right at least you know if you have good team maybe one week two weeks right with interite with few clicks you can deliver uh deploy uh cluster withinminutes okay it's as simple as that right from a [clears throat] operational aspect since the inventory management capacity management monitoring all that is from a single pane of as from a SAS delivered product you are able to now improve your operational efficiency across your enterprise. Okay. The third point is the continuous optimization. What does that mean? So interite intelligence what you provide by you get from interite you are able to optimize your infrastructure stack continuously. What do you mean by that is ma mainly what you're doing there is you are able to um compliance check for example I'll give an example right uh compliance check okay if one of your hardware device goes out of compliance it alerts you okay if there is an problem with hardware it alerts you there is a firmware which is downdowngraded right it alerts you right so it's your infrastructure stack is optimized continuously anyquestions so far right from a infrastructure perspective what intrasite brings you is it's the single pane of glass management SAS simplicity and you're able to provision all your policies across geographically distributed assets flexot assets from a single point okay so it's a very powerful tool you know we have shown these demos to our customers and they really start adopting it right so if you just if they just by the EA and the license is there and they don't use it, you I encourage you guys to go and um do the demo, right? [clears throat] By the way, C++ is a Flexbot partner of the year. So, we do certain things a little bit different. So, I'll go over some of those uh things also for you. Interite management. Okay, from a management perspective, like I said earlier, it is centralized management. You can manage all your uh geographically distributed assets from a single point. From a visibility perspective, you have monitoring from central centralized monitoring. Um you have uh the um uh automation capabilities. You have provisioning performance management as well as your capacity management. Okay. Um it also NetApp and Cisco. NetApp as IMT and Cisco as HCL for compliance checks. What does it mean? What does it do? Right? It runs uh constantly checking your compliance for all the uh hardware component like computer network storage and if it deviates from a compliancy perspective it alerts youcan then take action to remediate that right from inter this is a uh for those who have done right you know how to install it it's pretty simple okay high level architecture you know I talk about this for 3 hours about the architecture right but you just need a VM which is called Cisco in sight assist appliance and you deploy that in your environment and all your um flexot components like um compute network storage uh it needs just the network connectivity okay and also the virtualization VMware v center appliance right it needs network connectivity and youadd it to that right and then youclaim the uh assist appliance to the interite and that's it it's like maybe 30 minutes of networkto get it up and running, right? This pretty straightforward, simple to work with, right? But when we go to customers, they when we ask them, hey, have you started? So, pretty much they have done this, but some of them don't take the next step because they don't know what it brings in. Also, one more key here is the AIQM. Um, another is also here from the product management team. Um there is you have to integrate that also to get some of the deeper visibility into your uh storage products. So this is how many of you know AQM right youguys are familiar with that right [clears throat] in site brings the infrastructure life cycle management to the next level. What I mean by that is it brings in proactive management for infrastructure stack. Okay. So um basically whatit does is say constantly your health monitoring is running for the for your assets across globally right and if it deviates I will give an example right if a dim issue happens for example right this is here whatever right so it automatically opens case to tack right um they do the triage and alert the customer saying that hey this happened do you want to fix it or do a RMA right um so then the customer can knock down Another uh yeah I spoke about the compliance validation earlier umand uh inventory management across healthchecks is very important. It checks the health of every component right not just computer network storage it also the virtualized VMs also checks and if some you can configure with thresholds okay like if it goes over certain threshold um you send an alert event notification and you can open as you know your in your service now or whatever right you can open the ticket and then take action on it absolutely improves your overall operational efficiency within the IT um and itbecomes more um more uh proactive right how we are doing this is because now the data for all the devices all the assets comes to a central point now we have the database uh data lake interite as the data lake and you're applying machine learning on it and AI is acting on it and you're proactively providing all that guidance actionable insights to your customers right it's pretty powerful I would definitely ly encourage you guys to do look at it and do some demos uh to your customer. Okay. ICO. How many of you have worked with ICO? Good. I have two or three. So, uh recently one of our customers, okay, lastyear we started deploying this flexot and we did a small demo around inite. Yeah. They saw all this visibility and whatnot. Right. When we came to inite ICO, they said, "Oh, wealready have VRA. We don't need um ICO we started working on vra which is we realize right we have I'm not trying to put down on vm where we realize but we showed a demo still we showed a demo on this the good thing about this is you don't need a programmer for orchestrating it okay every component like compute network storage virtualization it's a drag and drop okay most of the tasks are built in so you just drag and drop if you want to create a VM you want to proion a VM M and add a data store. That's your use case. Okay, you drag and drop bunch of tasks and it's done. Okay, it's as simple as that. When customers see that, that's like, you know, and you need to train them a little bit. Then what we did with this customer is we trained them. Now they're all in on ICO. So I would encourage you guys to do a little bit more to your education, right? you just get the awareness out there and it will really um it'll really take off from your customer. It really helps actually. Um how many of you work on like cloud orchestration? Not only onrem okay it also does cloud orchestration as well. Have you guys any worked on cloud orchestration?Yeah. So Yeah. So anyquestions on this? Uh so far from a hybrid cloud management perspective, what tools do you guys use? Is it terraform, Anible? What do you use? Mostly anible. Terapform. Yeah. Perfect. So here I mean use you can also call terraform if you or anible tower playbooks from interite also. VI works to do that right and this can be a platform to do your config management and for VM provisioning and whatnot some customers have we have done it uh use terapform to provision VMs right so those are different use cases which we can and there's a open API I mean APIs are pretty uh powerful within intrite um and I will get into the details a little bit later so here right NetAppwe worked with NetApp and Cisco on building most of the tasks in this connector inite as a connector for NetApp products. Okay. Um the connector was built mostly by our team. So [clears throat] I weare a system integrator. We work with variety of vendors right. Um now what I have seen is the most advanced task you can imagine it's already built insite for flexot. Okay. So be it compute, network, storage, virtualization, it's already built in. Um you want to create 1,500 data store. Yeah, it's there. You want to delete it. You want to expand your storage, all that is already built in. Okay. And they have NetApp has invested quite a bit onbuilding these tasks. So take advantage of it. It's free. I mean it's free meaning when you have the premier license, you can take advantage of it. So um Anand do you have any integration which you are working on to connect to blue XP? So the answer is there is it is in the road map but it's not there yet. So E+ is flex pod partner of the year like I said earlier but um and um we do have offerings around um flex pod and VMware deployment services public cloud service adoption um cloud marketplace offerings and whatnot right so um wide variety of uh services we do you know onrem as well as cloud uh services as well um our practice areas are um cloud data center networking collab and a emerging I mostly focus on AI and emerging. Um Justin here focuses on cloud and data center [clears throat] and our sec security practice is pretty um uh deep and we it we spans across all these uh different practices. We also have a financing uh team as well. So the life cycle for our customers how do you do it right? We pretty much do some discovery with the customer. We understand what their business outcome is. We build a road map for the customer. Then we you know try to select which platform is the right platform for it. IB flex part if they say I want to run SAP workload this is outcome I looking at wefind the right platform and then we go and execute it deployment and finally um it's not only manage and operations we do manageservices and whatn not but we also review those business outcome and KPI what we uhdefined in the strategy when we are doing the strategy in every quarterly and give them provide them feedback where we are where we what we did not accomplish so that it's a ongoing you know um task which we work with a customer right it's a life cycle how we uh do our uh services so um as I said earlier it's a unified Cisco interite is a unified um solution management solution it can manage not just storage it can manage um compute network virtualization it absolutely increases your um it also has AI capability like I said earlier so it gives you proactive umway to manage things, right? You don't have to be reactive. What I mean by that is you don't have to worry about hey thishappened, right? It also looks at stuff like um practively figuring out hey this error can happen in your environment please take action right thosesort of alerts come in um theywe have been working with intrite for since the inception um of inite with Cisco um and uh not only flexot it also does lot of other products as well okay it has integration with terraform anible and whatnot like I said before um you guys have any um ITSM you know like what do you guys use service now mostly so it has tie up to service now also so these actions and alerts which comes from interite triggers an opening ticket in um service now and if you do automated remediation then it goes and closes the ticket too right so it'spretty powerful um I don't have demo and whatnot but this is all I had and thank you all for spending this a short time, 20 minutes with me. Thank you. Enjoy your uh enjoy your flight back home. Yeah.
Throughout the session, attendees will explore the strategic aspects of managing a FlexPod® infrastructure with Cisco Intersight. Learn how to align FlexPod deployments with business goals, assess the impact of infrastructure changes on [...]