This article is based on a Cisco announcement originally reported by DevOps.com in September 2019.
Cisco Brings Ansible Automation to SAN Infrastructure
Cisco Systems announced expanded support for the open-source Ansible automation framework on its storage area network (SAN) platform, specifically targeting the Cisco MDS 9700 series. The move is part of a broader initiative to bring DevOps-style automation practices to enterprise IT infrastructure—an area that has historically lagged behind the automation maturity of application development pipelines.
With the updated MDS 9700 platform modules, IT operations teams can automate common SAN configuration tasks including:
- VSAN (Virtual SAN) configuration
- Device-alias configuration
- Zoning configuration
These are tasks that have traditionally required manual CLI work or vendor-specific tooling, making them slow, error-prone, and difficult to integrate into modern CI/CD workflows.
Why Ansible? A Declarative Approach for Operations Teams
According to Adarsh Viswanathan, Cisco’s product manager for data center storage at the time, the choice of Ansible was deliberate. Cisco had previously invested in open APIs, OpenStack integration, and Python-based scripting—all of which required meaningful programming knowledge from IT operations staff.
Ansible raises the abstraction level. Its declarative, YAML-based playbook model means that operations engineers can define what a storage configuration should look like without needing to write imperative code to achieve it. This lowers the barrier to automation adoption significantly, especially in enterprise IT teams that are not primarily composed of software developers.
Key characteristics of Ansible that make it well-suited for infrastructure automation in this context include:
- Agentless architecture: No software needs to be installed on managed devices, which matters for network and storage appliances.
- Idempotent playbooks: Running the same playbook multiple times produces the same result, reducing the risk of configuration drift.
- Large ecosystem: Ansible Galaxy and vendor-maintained collections (including Cisco’s own) provide ready-made modules for network and storage tasks.
- Low programming prerequisite: YAML-based playbooks are readable and writable by operations engineers without deep development skills.
Additional Platform Updates: NVMe, All-Flash, and SAN Analytics
Alongside the Ansible announcement, Cisco outlined several hardware and software updates for the MDS 9700 platform:
- 64G line card support: Higher-bandwidth line cards were planned to be supported when they became available.
- NVMe and All-Flash array support: Recognizing the shift toward low-latency NVMe-based storage, Cisco added protocol-level support for these environments.
- SAN Analytics extension: Cisco extended its SAN Analytics software to support the NVMe/Fibre Channel protocol, complementing existing SCSI/Fibre Channel support. This enables telemetry and performance monitoring across both legacy and modern storage protocols from a single platform.
The DevOps Pressure on IT Operations
The underlying driver for this type of announcement is a well-documented tension in enterprise IT: development teams accustomed to the on-demand, self-service model of public cloud providers increasingly expect the same experience from on-premises infrastructure. When they don’t get it, they route around IT operations—spinning up cloud resources directly and creating shadow IT sprawl.
At the time of this announcement, a significant majority of enterprise workloads still ran in on-premises data centers despite more than a decade of cloud adoption. IT operations teams managing those environments needed tools that let them respond to developer requests at cloud-like speed—provisioning and reconfiguring storage dynamically rather than through slow manual change-control processes.
Frameworks like Ansible directly address this gap by enabling infrastructure as code (IaC) practices for storage and networking, not just compute and application layers.
Cloud-Native Workloads and the SAN Challenge
Cloud-native applications built on microservices architectures add a further dimension to the problem. As the number of discrete application services sharing a common pool of SAN-attached infrastructure grows, the frequency and granularity of required storage configuration changes increases correspondingly. Manual processes simply cannot keep pace.
Ansible-based automation for platforms like the Cisco MDS 9700 means that zoning changes, VSAN provisioning, and device alias updates can be triggered programmatically—integrated into deployment pipelines or executed via self-service portals—rather than queued as manual tickets to a storage administrator.
Practical Takeaways for DevOps and Storage Engineers
If you manage Cisco MDS SAN environments and are evaluating automation strategies, the following points are worth considering:
- Explore Cisco’s Ansible collections: Cisco publishes and maintains Ansible collections for its networking and storage platforms on Ansible Galaxy. These provide purpose-built modules for MDS management tasks.
- Start with idempotent playbooks for existing configurations: Before automating changes, use Ansible to codify your current desired-state configurations. This creates an auditable baseline and enables drift detection.
- Integrate with your CI/CD pipeline: Storage configuration changes triggered by application deployments can be orchestrated through the same pipeline tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) used for application code.
- Evaluate SAN Analytics alongside automation: Automated provisioning without observability creates blind spots. Cisco’s SAN Analytics capabilities, especially with NVMe/FC support, complement automation by surfacing performance anomalies that may result from configuration changes.
- Plan for NVMe adoption: If your organization is moving toward All-Flash or NVMe-based storage, verify that your SAN platform’s Ansible modules support NVMe/FC operations, not just legacy SCSI/FC.
Summary
Cisco’s expansion of Ansible support on the MDS 9700 SAN platform is a concrete step toward making enterprise storage infrastructure manageable through the same automation frameworks used across the rest of the DevOps toolchain. By adopting Ansible’s declarative model, IT operations teams gain a practical path to automating SAN configuration at scale—without requiring deep programming expertise—while simultaneously supporting the modern storage protocols (NVMe/FC) that high-performance, cloud-native workloads demand.