Cisco and Red Hat solutions

Cisco and Red Hat have been collaborating for more than a decade to solve our customers' challenges from data centers to the edge. We share a commitment to open-source innovation, enterprise-class IT solutions, and collaboration that drives innovation in cloud computing, containerization, virtualization, automation, and security. 

Today, Cisco and Red Hat are helping IT leaders reduce costs; deliver applications faster, anywhere, more securely; and support AI initiatives with enterprise-class solutions. We provide a validated, full-stack, private cloud platform for deploying applications in containers and virtual machines, running AI workloads, and automating infrastructure operations from Cisco.  

Cisco and Red Hat solutions may be right for you if you are:   

• Reassessing your virtualization strategy and reliance on a single hypervisor vendor  
• Needing to reduce virtualization and public cloud costs by moving some workloads to bare metal 
• Considering containers to support modern applications and new AI workloads from data centers to distributed edge environments
• Exploring the automation of infrastructure management to reduce risk and improve productivity
• Looking to lower risk by using predesigned, validated data center architectures

Securely deploy applications faster—anywhere

Deploy and manage containerized applications at scale with solutions from Cisco and Red Hat

Eighty percent of IT leaders say all or most new applications will be built on cloud-native platforms over the next five years.* 

Deploying and managing containerized applications at scale is what Red Hat OpenShift is all about. This leading cloud-native container platform is used by more than 90% of the Fortune 500 to run containers on bare metal with Cisco UCS. 

Customers choose Red Hat OpenShift for its leadership in the Kubernetes market, support for fully managed cloud services, and consistency across all public cloud, data center, and edge environments. Customers choose Cisco UCS for its flexibility, performance, and operational simplicity. 

The benefits of running containers on bare metal from Red Hat and Cisco include:  

• Scalability and performance 
• Simplified management 
• Enhanced security 
• Optimized resource utilization  
• Flexibility and integration 
• Reliability and availability 
• Cost efficiency 

Try Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform or purchase it directly from Cisco to simplify your journey to application modernization. Ask your Cisco account manager for details. 

*Source: Techzine, June 2024

Reassess your virtualization strategy

Consolidate your containers and virtualization on a single platform

If changing market dynamics have caused you to rethink your virtualization strategy, Cisco and Red Hat have a proposal for you. 

Traditional virtualization platforms present challenges, including increasing costs, slow evolution, difficulties supporting growth and financial risk, and obstacles to developer productivity.  

Modern platforms, like Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, offer a way to reduce operational infrastructure costs, innovate at speed, and provide greater scalability, more security, and integrated development tools. 

Included with OpenShift, OpenShift Virtualization enables you to move, refactor, and modernize applications currently based on virtual machines into a cloud-native environment that can support both containers and virtual machines.  

OpenShift Virtualization also allows you to: 

• Accelerate application delivery with a single platform that manages applications using the same tools and teams  
• Maintain traditional virtual machine behavior in a modern Kubernetes platform (e.g., live migration) 
• Keep existing roles and responsibilities intact, so you can modernize skill sets over time  
• Simplify migration of virtual machines at scale with the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV)

Explore our resources below to learn more. Start a free trial today or ask your Cisco representative about purchasing Red Hat OpenShift with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. 

Support AI initiatives

Deliver AI solutions that delight your customers

To help organizations harness the power of AI and deliver greater customer value, Cisco offers a range of solutions tailored for different deployment needs. Whether you're looking for simplified on-premises infrastructure with AI PODs or robust AI capabilities at the network edge with Cisco Unified Edge, we provide the tools to drive innovation. 

One of the biggest opportunities today—across all industries—is to harness the power of AI to deliver greater customer value.   

Most organizations focus their initiatives on generative AI inferencing. To simplify on-premises infrastructure, Cisco offers AI PODs: purpose-built solutions designed for any organization to harness the power of artificial intelligence.  

AI PODs are ideal for organizations beginning their AI deployment journey. They include: 

• Predesigned architecture bundles, using technology from industry-leading partners—including OpenShift for containers 
• Framework for rapid deployment 
• Cloud-based management with Cisco Intersight 
• Validated use cases 
• Adoption services 
• Full-stack support 

Whether you're starting out with AI or scaling complex, high-performance workloads beyond legacy architecture, Cisco AI PODs deliver the performance, efficiency, and control you need to drive innovation with AI.  

Cisco Unified Edge for AI at the edge 

For organizations looking to deploy and operate complex AI workloads at the network edge, Cisco Unified Edge, powered by Red Hat’s advanced compute platform, provides a consistent, reliable, and standardized foundation. This joint solution brings together Cisco’s purpose-built hardware with Red Hat’s flexible, scalable software to support modern edge workloads, including the rise of AI at the edge. It enables organizations to deploy, scale, and operate AI-powered applications with confidence and control anywhere across the hybrid edge.

Key components supporting AI at the edge include Cisco Unified Edge hardware, Red Hat’s advanced compute platform (built on open-source foundations such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux), and Red Hat AI Inference Server, which optimizes model inference across environments, including remote edge locations, for efficient and cost-effective model deployments.

Create and deploy GenAI and predictive models at scale 

Red Hat also provides Red Hat OpenShift AI, an integrated platform for building, training, tuning, deploying, and monitoring AI-enabled applications—plus predictive and foundation models—securely and at scale across hybrid-cloud environments. Red Hat OpenShift AI can be purchased directly from Cisco. 

To provide enterprises with validated, production-ready infrastructure solutions for MLOps using Red Hat OpenShift AI, Cisco offers comprehensive designs. These include FlashStack for AI: MLOps using Red Hat OpenShift AI (which leverages FlashStack Virtual Server Infrastructure) and FlexPod Datacenter with Red Hat OpenShift AI for MLOps, built on FlexPod bare-metal infrastructure. Also see the Cisco AI POD for Enterprise Training and Fine-Tuning Design Guide. These solutions are designed to accelerate AI/ML efforts and streamline model delivery at scale.

See our resources to learn more about Red Hat OpenShift AI, or start a free trial today. 

Automate your infrastructure for efficiency and agility

Streamline operations from Day 0 to Day 2 and beyond

Today, organizations need to manage IT infrastructure with speed, consistency, and reduced manual effort. Automation is critical for ensuring continuous compliance, improving security, scaling resources dynamically, and accelerating application delivery across hybrid environments.

Cisco and Red Hat deliver a powerful, integrated automation solution built on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Cisco Intersight. This collaboration provides a single, trusted approach to orchestrate critical workflows, unify teams, and support diverse automation use cases across data center and edge environments.

The benefits of automating with Red Hat and Cisco include:

• Comprehensive lifecycle automation: Includes day-0 deployments, day-1 configurations, and day-2 operations and scalability for Cisco UCS, OpenShift, OpenShift Virtualization, and AI infrastructure. Also includes firmware upgrades, port configuration, infrastructure expansion, and network automation.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Leverage Ansible playbooks to treat infrastructure configurations like software code, enabling version control, automated testing, and CI/CD practices for greater reliability and consistency.
• Unified management with Cisco Intersight: Our cloud-based management platform, Cisco Intersight, integrates seamlessly with Ansible Automation Platform. It provides a single dashboard and robust API to automate policy-driven provisioning, manage configurations, and ensure operational visibility across your entire Cisco infrastructure.
• Accelerated AI and application modernization: You can establish a solid foundation for AI implementations and containerized applications by simplifying the deployment, management, and lifecycle of AI models and OpenShift clusters.
• Reduced risk and faster time-to-value: Use Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) and the rapidly growing Cisco Intersight–certified Content Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (which now includes more than 100 modules), Ansible Automation Platform Certified and Validated Content Collections to deploy pre-tested, standardized, and repeatable architectures, significantly reducing risk and accelerating time-to-value. 

Organizations using Cisco and Red Hat automation can achieve significant operational efficiencies like improved consistency, enhanced security posture, and greater business agility.

Explore our resources on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, including “Enhancing Day 2 Operations with Cisco Compute and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.” Start a free trial of Cisco Intersight today. Ask your Cisco account manager about purchasing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform directly from Cisco.

For performant and predictable deployments

Together, Cisco and Red Hat bring our technology to customers through Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs), providing tested architectures for standardized, repeatable deployments. 

Our ready-to-go solutions include: 

• More than 20 CVDs with Red Hat technology 
• Faster time-to-market with lower risk 
• Strong total cost of ownership (TCO) and faster time-to-value 
• Cisco Success Tracks

See Red Hat CVDs, or view all CVDs.