Networking Guidance for the Multicloud Data Center

Modern enterprise applications are exerting a tremendous pressure on your SAN infrastructure. Keeping up with the trends, customers are looking to invest in higher performing storage and storage networking. Combining the economic viability of All Flash Arrays and the technological advancements with NVMe over FC, there has never been a more compelling opportunity to upgrade your SAN infrastructure that offers investment protection with Support for 64G Fibre Channel Performance.

It is well understood that maximizing ROI on flash investments requires higher network speeds, typically 32Gbps or even 64Gbps. But before you make that decision, have you considered these key questions:

- Do you really need to “RIPlace” your existing infrastructure?
- Is it GDPR compliant?
- Is it 64Gb ready?
- Does it support NVMe?
- Does it provide integrated SAN analytics for diagnostics and troubleshooting?

The new innovations from Cisco not only provide investment protection, but also enable you to unlock innovative SAN analytics, which are built into the hardware. Learn how the integrated analytics and automation capabilities are going to change the way you design SAN for your growing business needs. Discover how these solutions maximize the performance of your existing SAN as we reveal:

- New hardware and software capabilities
- Enhanced analytics for FC and NVMe
- Use cases and best practices

Join us and get your questions answered during the live webinar. Find out how you can build an efficient storage infrastructure of the future – now.

As your network extends beyond the confines of the physical data center into multicloud environments, supporting an ever-growing number of applications becomes a significant security management challenge.

Through this webinar, you will learn how to unify, consolidate and automate your entire network security policy management, wherever your applications reside, in today’s evolving multicloud landscape.

This webinar will be presented by Srinivas Kotamraju, Cisco Senior Director, Product Management, Data Center Infrastructure, and Avishai Wool, AlgoSec CTO and Co-founder.

We will cover key aspects of network security policy management, including:
- Managing and applying security policy changes quickly, while assessing and reducing risk, ensuring continuous compliance, and maintaining a strong security posture.
- Achieving Visibility, Automation, Compliance and Risk Assessment for the Cisco ACI security environment across the enterprise network.

It’s decision time regarding your organization’s IT network infrastructure. Is your technology addressing your operational and resource challenges with multicloud? Hear from experts, IDC Research Vice President Brad Casemore and Cisco Senior Director Daniel McGinniss, as they discuss how data center network modernization can provide the agility, flexibility, reliability and security required across a distributed application landscape.

We’ll cover:
•New IDC research on reasons for multicloud adoption and priorities for AI-enabled network automation
•Challenges organizations are facing in their networking evolution and how to address them
•Cisco’s approach to data center network modernization

Get your questions answered by our experts in a live Q&A at the conclusion of the webinar.

In this webinar, we will cover the frameworks for network automation and policy abstraction in multicloud environments. Cisco Cloud ACI automates management of end-to-end connectivity and enforcement of consistent security policies for applications running in hybrid and multicloud environments. The solution is now available in a cloud-only mode with support on AWS and Microsoft Azure clouds.

This session will cover the key business problems being solved by Cloud ACI, the architecture, hybrid cloud use cases and operating models for multicloud networking.

Get your questions answered by our experts in a live Q&A at the conclusion of the webinar.

Applications need the network to communicate, operate, integrate, etc. All of the things that an Application might do on the network, in the network, and with other networks requires configuration and policy. Automating the management of configurations and policy for applications in all the required places through APIs can be a daunting task. The APIs can vary, for example, methodologies to implement the APIs, authentication processes, transport protocol utilization, and more. This session shows the use of Ansible and its uniform approach to managing application configuration and policy deployment. Attendees will learn where to retrieve the Ansible Playbooks and supporting files, how the Ansible environment is structured, and the Ansible modules utilized. This session will include a demo of the Automate Application Configuration and Policy Deployment with Ansible use case found of DevNet Automation Exchange.

Chances are that your SAN is already feeling the pressure from an avalanche of data due to recent trends, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), AI/ML and analytics. All that data can add real value to your business — if you can access it and use it instantly at any time.

But how do you scale your bandwidth easily? And how do you simplify your operations? Do you have real-time visibility into your SAN?

Learn how the new higher speed Fibre Channel transition is fueled by new technology that allows you to fully realize the potential of your high-performance applications and all-flash storage arrays. The new innovations not only provide your customers investment protection but also enable them to unlock innovative SAN analytics, which are built into the hardware. Learn how the integrated analytics and automation capabilities are going to change the way you design SAN for your growing business needs.

Discover how these solutions maximize the performance of your existing SAN as we reveal:
- New hardware and software capabilities
- Enhanced analytics for FC and NVMe
- Use cases and best practices

Join us and get your questions answered during the live webinar. Find out how you can build an efficient storage infrastructure of the future — now.

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is designed API first, making it an automator’s, developer’s and programmer’s dream. When every aspect of a product is available via an API, there is no limit to the scale, robustness and functionality of integrations and applications.

Programmability, automation and orchestration capabilities have become the hottest topics in must-have product features. While some companies are scrambling to retrofit their offerings with APIs, Cisco ACI was designed API first. The API retrofitted products typically only provide a subset of the commonly used features. Cisco ACI offers access to every aspect of the ACI object model, the foundation of all ACI programmability.

Cisco DevNet is the resource for all Cisco ACI programmability needs. APIs are good; full-coverage APIs are better; full-coverage APIs combined with Cisco DevNet developer support are best. Cisco DevNet provides comprehensive programmability resources, e.g. API documentation, programmability-focused learning labs, real and virtualized hardware programmability environments, videos, blogs and more.

What you’ll learn:
- What is DevNet and who can use it (Hint: anyone, you don’t have to be a Cisco customer)
- What are DevNet Cisco ACI API focused resources
- How to access the Always-On Cisco ACI Sandbox and how to reserve an ACI Sandbox
- How to use tools like Postman to issue a REST calls that interact with Cisco ACI APIs
- And more!

Join us as we cover the current state of modern telemetry infrastructure supporting Day 2 operations. See how Cisco’s Network Insights provides a common tooling for ACI and NX-OS to efficiently deliver information for Day 2 operations, all built on top of a scale-out micro-services architecture. See where data comes un-throttled from the switches forwarding chip (ASIC), how we receive this mass of information and learn about the benefits, trade-offs and challenges across ingestion, retention, correlation and visualization.

Plus, ask our experts your questions during the live Q&A!

The network is the gateway to and between the applications that drive the digital economy. And with applications active at all points in the network, traditional enterprise and data center networks and their respective operational procedures must evolve to keep pace.

Intent-based networking (IBN) offers a significant paradigm shift in how networks are planned, designed and operated. And the journey to elevate networks to an intent-based model is well under way. Join this session to better understand the essential IBN building blocks and capabilities you need to meet your network’s scale, agility and security demands.

We’ll cover:
- The why, what and how of intent-based networking
- Common uses cases that provide guidance on how you can get started
- How you can bridge IBN across domains such as the campus, WAN and the data center

Plus, you can ask questions during our live Q&A!

Data is ubiquitous, and application complexity is increasing. IDC expects spending on cloud IT infrastructure to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.2%, reaching $82.9 billion in 2022, and accounting for 56.0% of total IT infrastructure spend. Public cloud data centers will account for 66.0% of this amount, growing at an 11.3% CAGR. Spending on private cloud infrastructure will grow at a CAGR of 12.0%.

Due to this massive shift in the decentralization of data, increasing cloud acceptance and move to hybrid environments, businesses need a network that can empower the data center to go securely anywhere.

The Cisco Cloud ACI on AWS solution automates management of end-to-end connectivity and enforcement of consistent network security policies for applications running in on-prem data centers and AWS cloud regions.

What you’ll learn:
- How Cloud ACI on AWS will enable secure networking, consistent policy and segmentation in a hybrid cloud world
- How to automate and secure hybrid connectivity through unified management
- Enable consistent security posture, governance and compliance through a universal policy model
- Enable elasticity for resources across on-premises data center and AWS cloud
- Facilitate workload migration across hybrid environments
- Enable business continuity and disaster recovery

The data center isn’t disappearing. But it is changing. Digital transformation is redefining applications and workloads, and moving more tasks to the edge. Hear from experts, IDC SVP Matt Eastwood and Cisco Sr. Director Todd Brannon, as they discuss how infrastructure and operations teams can create a foundation for accelerated innovation.

We’ll cover:

•New IDC research on IT investment strategies and organizational transformation
•How the data center needs to evolve as digital business and cloud computing grow
•How to address the operational challenges of on-premises, decentralized and multi-cloud workloads

We’ll also open it up for a live Q&A, so our experts can answer your questions.

Presenters:
Matt Eastwood, IDC, Senior Vice President of Enterprise, Datacenter, Cloud Infrastructure and Developers
Todd Brannon, Cisco, Senior Director, Enterprise Solutions, Data Center Marketing

"By 2022, nearly 40% of operational processes will be self-healing and self-learning – minimizing the need for human intervention or adjustments," according to IDC.

Enterprises are experiencing an unrelenting need to accelerate speed, flexibility, security and scale across increasingly complex data centers and multi-cloud environments. They're shifting to strategies driven by applications running multiple instances within these multi-clouds – and looking to simplify the management and scalability of these environments. By automating basic IT operations with a centralized and consistent policy across multiple data centers and geographies, customers can more easily and securely move and manage workloads with a single pane of glass.

Join us to see why a sophisticated Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution is no longer a “good to have” data center requirement – it’s now the underpinning for a successful, profitable business. We'll learn how ACI comprehensively supports the four pillars of a successful SDN solution – Performance, Availability, Security and Automation. We'll then take a look at the ACI object model, and how the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) provides a policy-driven approach to managing those objects through a single REST API that can use both XML and JSON formats. In closing, we'll show how you can have the flexibility to run applications across your own private clouds – as well as public clouds of your choice – while maintaining consistent network policies across an entire multi-cloud domain.

The clock never stops ticking in a data center. And every tick after an app was supposed to launch means more losses to a company—and its IT team’s reputation. So find out how to put time on your side. Discover how IT teams use intent-based networking (IBN) to slash network downtime and performance issues.

Join this webinar to understand how IBN uses policy, automation and analytics to minimize human error, network drift and security risk. You’ll learn:

- How IBN continuously aligns networks to changing business requirements
- Best practices for planning and deploying an IBN model
- Common use cases of solutions in action

Plus, you can ask questions of the experts during the live Q&A!

This session will cover the integration between Cisco Prime Service Catalog and Red Hat OpenShift. The result of this partnership is a new innovative tool that enables end users to order and take delivery of fully configured application stacks from a unified self-service portal. In this session you will learn:

•What is an application blueprint and how it enables automated deployment of application stacks in a consistent manner
•How Cisco Prime Service Catalog delivers a single pane-of-glass for all users to provision, configure and manage complete application stacks
•How configure complete application stacks including the underlying components such as network services
•Auto-scaling and load balancing capabilities of this solution relieve developers of the need to recreate platform services for each application

Confidently integrate Cisco’s security portfolio to respond to the increasingly sophisticated attacks being targeted at the data center. This webcast will focus on the new secure data center technologies based on the latest Cisco Validated Design. This solution makes sure of the secure and reliable delivery of business applications across the data center.

This webcast utilizes several primary technologies, such as the Cisco ASA 5585-X Firewall with Intrusion Prevention, Lancope Stealthwatch, Cisco TrustSec, Cisco UCS Director, and Secure Enclaves Architecture on FlexPod in a design that brings application awareness to the data center fabric and network services.

Primary attributes of the design:
•ASA firewall clustering for scalability
•Fabric integration with virtual port channels (vPCs)
•Link aggregation for simplified operations
•Intrusion protection and application visibility
•Real-time signature updates
•Secure group tags (SGTs) for policy aggregation

Customers who deploy the solutions benefit from simplified operations, increased availability, enhanced utilization of fabric resources, and threat mitigation and remediation of advanced persistent threats (APTs).

Cisco introduces VMDC DCI solution which provides validated design to ensure high availability and performance for applications across Metro and Geo data centers. This solution unlocks Business continuity and stateful workload mobility which is top of mind for both public and private cloud providers to connect multiple data centers to support Business Critical operations.

Workloads continue to increase in data centers, be they virtual or physical. The network infrastructure must respond to these operational demands with ever greater agility. Cisco DFA or Dynamic Fabric Automation is an evolution of the Cisco Data Center and Cloud Networking which enables customers to gain efficiency and increase service velocity. Cisco DFA simplifies fabric management, optimizes the infrastructure, and automates network provisioning with the Cisco Nexus 2000, 5000, 6000, and 7000 Series Switches

Cisco DFA combines innovations in:
•fabric management
•fabric infrastructure
•workload provisioning

With DFA, customers gain unsurpassed operational simplicity thorough superior integration and can scale well beyond 4,000 VLANs and tenants. This session will help you understand how Cisco DFA technology can be deployed incrementally in the evolving data center. Customer use cases will show real-world benefits. A demonstration included will illustrate some of the DFA capabilities in more detail.

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC) is a holistic cloud management solution with broad coverage for various types of cloud deployments.

View this demo to see how you can manage cloud services delivered on the OpenStack platform, providing you with a viable cloud solution built on open source components. For more info, go to http://cisco.com/go/iacloud and