Cisco has helped customers easily turn up and manage bare metal workloads. Now, tech development firms Cisco and Red Hat present another integrated solution. They are introducing a merger of the former’s cloud-operations management platform with the latter’s assisted installation program.
The new solution is meant for use in the management of containerized environments. It brings together Cisco Intersight and Red Hat OpenShift to handle a variety of complex and time-intensive work processes. This is a boon, given how almost 80% of enterprises have adopted bare-metal containers in their production environments.
This integration is the latest in many initiatives Cisco and Red Hat have engaged in over the past several years. Quite recently, Cisco integrated its UCS X-series server systems with several applications running on OpenShift.
According to Dhritiman Dasgupta, Cisco’s vice-president for cloud computing, bare metal has become a popular choice for running containers in a growing range of applications, as well as customer use. Bare metal is necessary for data-intensive workloads like AI/ML and online transaction processing. It can easily be customized to boost the performance of numerous features. This includes high-speed interconnection, specialized memory, storage, as well as graphics processing units (GPUs).
However, Dasgupta cautioned that connecting bare metal resources could prove to be a challenge for many IT firms. It takes time to connect individual servers, configuring storage systems and networks, booting from an installation operating system, and even setting up more complex provisioning networks and hosts for multi-site automation. For this reason, the integrated Intersight-OpenShift solution will certainly come in handy.
Intersight features are expected to enable customers to automate necessary steps for bare-metal installation of OpenShift by using Server Profile Templates. In turn, this enables system administrators to define policies for numerous settings, including BIOS, boot order, and various configurations.
This process can be replicated as the number of deployed OpenShift clusters increases. This would create a standardized template for configuring various elements necessary for bare-metal containerization. Automation will also make processes more efficient. It will decrease the number of manual steps to install additional clusters.
Integrating Intersight with OpenShift also enables Cisco’s cloud computing team to deploy a number of innovative measures. This includes inventory information exchange between platforms to enable the auto-discovery of new bare-metal compute. It also aids other vital operational tasks like software upgrades, resource optimization, intelligent workload mobility, and security.
