It is hard to believe that in 2018 there are some people in IT who haven’t groked the importance of good Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). I still hear “Yes, APIs are important to have, but they really aren’t critical.” We respectfully disagree. The rapid adoption of public and private clouds has been driven by the ability to provide developer self-service. The best way to have a successful self-service cloud is to have all administration tasks be automated. And the most effective way to drive and automate infrastructure is with Application APIs.
API’s are the one of the key elements in building a Data-Centric Architecture which allows organizations to optimally store, share, and ultimately analyze data in a multi-cloud world. They enable you to build an on-demand and self-driving infrastructure that lets your storage team deliver data-as-a-service to your development teams.
Pure Storage continues to provide an API-first strategy across our platform and services and we aren’t alone in this. This week at Cisco Live, Pure Storage and Cisco are showcasing a proof-of-concept of the first third-party vendor integration with Cisco Intersight™, a cloud-based systems management platform. This integration demonstrates how Intersight’s management capabilities can be extended through open API’s to allow customers to have one place to manage and orchestrate a full converged data center solution like FlashStack™.
Cisco Intersight includes a RESTful API – the Intersight Open Connector framework – that supports the OpenAPI standard to provide full programmability and deep integrations with third-party tools and systems. And the Pure Storage FlashArray REST API makes the full command surface area for FlashArray management available to developers. And these combine easily and quickly.
It took one developer with no knowledge of Pure Storage less than 3 weeks to build a connector that allows Intersight to orchestrate monitoring,
provisioning and managing snapshots through Intersight. Not only does this allow for automated storage provisioning, but the Pure Storage functionality can be controlled by Intersight Orchestrator as part of a self-service catalog for driving automation across compute, network and storage.
This integration leverages the API-first approaches of both Cisco and Pure Storage and, when available, will allow customers to have single lifecycle management tool to confidently build and manage their clouds on Cisco and Pure infrastructure.
Cisco and Pure will be demonstrating this proof-of-concept Intersight integration at Cisco Live in booth #2013 with the intent to offer this it to customers in the second half of the year.
While Pure Storage is the first partner to join the Cisco Intersight ecosystem, other partners and customers can in the future leverage the Intersight API to develop their own integrations.
This demonstration is just one example of the how APIs are critical to data-driven strategy that can provide a transformative experience for our customers accelerates development gets code to the business and to market faster.
