Itential announced today that it has added more capabilities to work within Cisco's Network Services Orchestrator in order to speed up automation for enterprises.
Itential and Cisco NSO improve enterprises' network automation by providing drag and drop tools for developers and network engineers while also reducing the need for time-consuming hard coding.
The integration provides the ability to define and implement intelligent network automation in a low code environment, which helps enterprises close the skills gap.
Itential said its YANG-based interpretation engine allows for dynamically generated, reusable components based on the models from Cisco NSO for use in network automation workflows, or in custom applications that can be built on top of the combined platform by customers.
Itential can also extend the configuration management capabilities of Cisco NSO through the use configuration templates. The templates allow a network operator to define standard configurations for a device type that can vary by region or use case for that device and run audit reports against the live network that check for compliance against the defined standard. The templates can also conduct remediation of those devices that are out of compliance either in a manual or automated fashion.
The enhanced Itential and Cisco NSO integration includes using NETCONF, REST and JSON RPC APIs to give more depth to the NSO capabilities within the Itential platform.
“Itential’s deep integration with NSO, developed through years of working with network operators and deployed in some of the largest, most complex global networks, has enabled us to provide a more accessible user experience through drag and drop automation creation and embedded network intelligence,” said Chris Wade, co-founder and CTO, Itential, in a prepared statement. “By extending the use cases possible with NSO, such as configuration standards compliance and remediation, beyond what NSO alone is capable of, our customers are able to realize the true benefits of modern, automated networks.”
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Itential first started working with Cisco more than four years ago through its work Tail-f, which Cisco bought in 2014 for $175 million.
In order to further its automation efforts, Itential works with open source projects such as OpenDaylight, Open Network Automation Platform and Juniper’s Tungsten Fabric, according to its website.
Itential also has a partnership with Red Hat Ansible and most recently released its Ansible Manager application that provides a visual representation of Ansible playbooks, modules and roles to help accelerate automation across the Ansible platform.
While not providing names, Itential said its network automation software is used by six of the 10 largest service providers in the world and three of the five top U.S. financial services institutions. The company was founded five years ago and currently has north of 85 employees.