Datanet Systems was, this year, Technology Partner at Connect Romania – the largest annual event dedicated to the local Cisco partners and customers ecosystem.
In addition to presentations at the stand, Datanet specialists have approached three main themes at the event:
- Increasing operational efficiency by automating infrastructure upgrading processes;
- Methods of superior capitalization of Cisco Umbrella and StealthWatch security solutions;
- Advantages of the new Cisco Container Platform management system, presented for the first time in Romania.
At the start of the event, Dragos Stroescu, CEO Datanet Systems, detailed how automation and robotization are generating major changes in more and more industries:
“In the automotive industry, the manufacturing process tends to be completely robotic.” In Health, AI Diagnostic Systems are faster and more precise than classical ones. In the Customer Care area, increasingly more simple interaction processes are automated and voice recognition systems are widely adopted. In Romania there are already organizations that have automatized their system this year the chat system with their clients. In the IT industry, automation gains ground – Robotic Process Automation is a great success and Machine Learning technologies are integrated into more and more software solutions. Automation generates major transformations of business models and processes. We have also assimilated and exploited the phenomenon within Datanet Systems to generate plus-value for our customers.”
Cristian Ruta, Deputy Technical Director of Datanet Systems, presented the practical applications of automation developed by the company to streamline infrastructure upgrade projects. The Datanet Specialist has exemplified practical benefits that automation generates in infrastructure upgrading projects for service providers, where network equipment has complex configurations (with over 20,000 lines) and requires hundreds of services to be verified, in a limited time.
“Translating from an old iOS generation to the current one on all of a service provider’s equipment is a difficult task to do in a maintenance window. To streamline this process, we have developed within Datanet a series of scripts that automate all the operations carried out. Automation allows us to automatically connect to each equipment and to collect the specific configuration parameters that are entered into a database. Then, using other scripts, we establish the new configurations with the equipment-specific variables and the tool we developed generates a report that detects and selects the differences in configurations that appear, which significantly increases the efficiency of the verification process, and also the specialist’s work is much simplified”, Cristian Ruta explained.
Earnings generated directly for the customer consist in reducing the duration of the process by up to 4 times, with the associated savings.
“Automation helps us deliver top quality services, eliminating human errors, being more agile when performing operations on customer networks, and more efficient and scalable when deploying large projects,” Datanet’s technical director concluded.
In the second session, Faruk Hairedin and Octavian Szolga, Senior Security Consultants within Datanet Systems, presented a series of practical scenarios for using and integrating Cisco Umbrella and Cisco StealthWatch solutions already implemented by the company.
You can read HERE details of how Umbrella integrates with other Cisco solutions, providing you with extensive protection, and HERE how StealthWatch exploits the new proprietary functionalities of Encrypted Traffic Analytics, that inspect encrypted traffic without actually decrypting it.
Mihai Gagea, Presales Consultant at Datanet Systems, presented – for the first time in Romania – the new container management solution Cisco Container Platform, recently launched (April, 2018).
“We are seeing a proliferation of containers in company infrastructures and, even if we want it or not, they are starting to interact with the rest of the systems around them. That’s why it’s time to start preparing for application developers to use containers more and more. If we do not offer the right environment in our Date Centers, they will most likely choose the Cloud Public, where they will develop and test the containers before introducing them into our production environment. But working in the public Cloud generates security issues and creates a dependency on the provider – updates, patches, etc. Also migrating containers back into their own Data Center may cause problems, because it is not enough to have only one tool to lift our containers, but we also need one to check if they work accordingly and if they need any repairs, another one to make automated configurations, applications, networking, etc.,” explained Mihai Gagea.
Cisco Container Platform (CCP) is Cisco’s answer to all these problems, a mostly Open Source suite of applications that allows companies to work much easier with consoles – creating, managing, monitoring, deleting, and so on. All the solutions included in the CCP “package” are also available separately and can be manually configured, but the effort is much higher, considering that there are over 20 applications. Cisco has packaged, verified and configured solutions so they work best together, creating a stable system that can be quickly put into production. In addition, Cisco provides full suite support, another major advantage over most of the Open Source distributions.
According to the Datanet specialist, newer versions of Cisco platform (version 2.0 will be released later this year) will also include support for non-Cisco hardware infrastructures (any third-party VMware infrastructure with vCenter v6.5 or newer) as well as integration with Cloud Center, the Cisco workload management solution in public Cloud environments (Amazon, Azure, Google).
The sixth edition of the event organized by Cisco Romania included 22 presentations and technical sessions supported by 14 partner companies and brought together over 1,200 professionals from IT, utilities, telecoms, security, transport, health, etc.
Datanet Systems, Cisco’s main integrator and developer in Romania thanks its clients and partners who have attended the event.
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