(Translated from Swedish) On the 29/1-2 2 Cisco Live Europe – 2018, CLEUR-18 took place in Barcelona, Spain. Here’s a small blog post about my first visit to Cisco Live, by Joacim Wicander Sr. Data Center Engineer Conscia Netsafe.
My Cisco Live Week began with the trip down to Barcelona on Sunday, 28/1 – 2018. I met with some of my Danish colleagues from Conscia A / S at Kastrup. Monday’s technical seminar about Cisco Hyperflex was held by Jost van der Made, a really good Cisco guy from Amsterdam.
On Monday evening there was a dinner with the entire Conscia group and our guest customers in a really nice place on one of the hills found in and around Barcelona.
The rest of the week’s seminars were about Cisco UCS or Cisco ACI integrated with Kubernetes or other container solutions. Most seminars were really good and very instructive. The only improvement I could think of here is that the planning of these seminars could have been done better, ie seminars describing basic things would ideally take place before more advanced seminars.
Recommended technical seminars at Cisco Live
A couple of Technical seminars I can recommend to interested parties are:
- BRKACI-2505, Deploying Kubernetes in the Enterprise with Cisco ACI
- BRKACI-2508, Nexus Standalone fabric migration to ACI
- BRKCLD-2091, Introduction to Kubernetes on UCS
- BRKSDN-2115, Introduction to Containers and Container Networking
During the week, a few Data Center-innovations were launched. The things I took a closer look at were:
- Cisco Hyperflex 3.0
- Cisco Container Platform
- Cisco Network Assurance Engine
Cisco Hyperflex 3.0
Cisco Hyperflex 3.0 is a big Cisco step forward in the Hyperconverged world. Previously, the only thing you could run on Hyperflex was VMware ESXi, but in version 3.0 you will be able to run Microsoft Hyper-V as well as Cisco Container Platform (I will write more about the latter below).
Scalability in Cisco Hyperflex grows with each version released, and 3.0 is no exception. In version 3.0, you will be able to run up to 32 + 32 nodes in an all-flash cluster (32 Storage nodes and 32 Compute only nodes).
Cisco Container Platform
With the Cisco Container Platform, Cisco now provides a Google-based Kubernetes-distribution that is very easy to install on prem. The wizard-like experience spins up a Kubernetes cluster in a few minutes.
Initially, this will only run on Cisco Hyperflex, but Cisco is working to release it for bare metal as well (Cisco UCS).
With this platform released, users can get exactly the same experience on prem as if they were running in Google Cloud. For more information about Cisco Container Platform, visit:
https://blogs.cisco.com/cloud/cisco-cloud-platform-whats-in-it-for-me
Cisco Network Assurance Engine
Cisco Network Assurance Engine (NAE) transforms data center operations into a more proactive model. NAE verifies the network for correctness, which gives operators confidence that their networks always are functionally consistent with intent.
With NAE you can
- proactively predict and verify the correctness of a change, leading to a reduction of network errors caused by human factors
- guarantee and eliminate potential network errors and error sources before the business impact by continuously analyzing and verifying the dynamic state of the entire network against intent and policy
- reduce security risks and achieve proven continuous compliance by ensuring network security policies and monitoring compliance with company policies and policies
How NAE works:
- Data collection. NAE collects network-wide device permissions and configurations, controls against policy and operator intentions
- Comprehensive network modeling, NAE builds mathematically accurate representations of network behaviors that span underlay, overlay and virtualization layers.
- Intelligent Analysis, NAE runs ongoing thousands of knowledge-based error controls to generate SmartEvents that identifies deviations from intent and proposes remediation steps.
And one more thing… …KUBAM
KUBAM is a community-driven project for the deplyment of operating systems on Cisco UCS servers, primarily Kubernetes, but also ESXi. KUBAM does not need PXE, DHCP, TFTP or advanced network configurations to work.
KUBAM transforms your bare metal servers into liquid that can be shaped and modified to meet all your deepest data center requirements. To learn more about KUBAM, go to: https://blogs.cisco.com/developer/kubam-let-your-data-center-dance
The Conscia Cisco Live 2018-concept
All Conscia Group companies, Conscia A/S, Conscia Netsafe, Conscia Norway and Vosko, as well as our guest customers stayed together (at two different hotels) and we had shared dinners during three evenings. Two of these evenings were attended by Cisco, with Cisco representatives representing the areas they worked with.
I had the privilege of sitting down with both customers and Cisco representatives. It was very rewarding to get to discuss how customers worked with different Cisco solutions implemented in their networks.
A bright future in the data center
There is a lot going on within the Data Center track at Cisco, not only proprietary solutions presented but also community driven projects (KUBAM) that appear and both impress and fascinate me. I’m looking forward to working with these new solutions, some already available (KUBAM and Cisco NAE) while others are coming in the spring (Cisco Container Platform and Hyperflex 3.0).
If any of the products mentioned above are interesting to you, or if you want to discuss or get updated regarding Cisco Data Center Solutions, contact us at Conscia Netsafe.
Also, do not miss my little piece on Cisco Intersight here (Swedish).
