Product Manager Intern

Red Hat validates LSD Open for virtual machine migrations. Promoted | LSD Open has been validated to migrate and run VMs on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization across sub-Saharan Africa. LSD Open, a cloud-native and AI systems integrator, has been named a Red Hat Specialized Partner for Virtualization in sub-Saharan Africa. The designation adds to the company's Red Hat Premier Business Partner status and recognises technical expertise and service capability around virtual machines. Virtual machine platforms have had an unsettled few years. Consolidation among traditional VM vendors has left many companies facing pricing they cannot sustain and lock-in they did not choose, pushing them to look elsewhere to protect existing VM investments. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization runs virtual machines alongside containerised applications on a cloud-native platform. LSD Open worked with Red Hat to formalise its skills around it. "As Red Hat continues to evolve and improve its global partner experience, we are committed to helping partners build critical skills and services capabilities that can fuel real business outcomes for customers," says Laurie Fontaine, Red Hat senior director for the global commercial partner ecosystem. "We are pleased to collaborate with LSD Open as part of the Red Hat Specialized Partner program to effectively guide customers in shaping and achieving their IT modernisation goals using industry-leading open source solutions and validated services." Working with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, LSD Open helps customers migrate virtual machines to a platform engineered, deployed and managed by Red Hat-certified specialists. That standardises infrastructure and opens a path to modernisation, putting virtual infrastructure on the same footing as cloud-native applications. 'Relentless dedication' The Red Hat Specialized Partner programme validates professional services and technical skills across the customer lifecycle. Partners qualify by demonstrating validated capability in one or more of Red Hat's core technology areas. "Achieving the Red Hat Virtualization specialisation is a proud milestone for LSD Open, showcasing our team's relentless dedication to the Red Hat ecosystem," says Neil White, CEO of LSD Open. "We believe wholeheartedly in Red Hat's open-source vision and tech stack, and this accreditation validates our ability to execute at the highest level. As businesses actively rethink their IT infrastructure, we are thrilled to bring Red Hat's platform to our clients as a powerful, enterprise-grade alternative to traditional virtualization technologies." To discuss virtualisation or arrange a migration assessment, contact [email protected]. * Read more articles by LSD Open on TechCentral * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned

Red Hat appoints Prem Pavan to lead APAC partner ecosystem. Sarah Weston 26 August, 2026 Red Hat has announced the appointment of Prem Pavan as Vice President, Head of APAC Ecosystem, reinforcing the company's focus on helping partners across Asia Pacific support customers in adopting open hybrid cloud, AI and virtualisation technologies. In this role, Prem will lead Red Hat's partner ecosystem strategy across Asia Pacific, working with cloud hyper-scalers, global systems integrators (GSIs), independent software vendors (ISVs), technology partners, value-added resellers (VARs) and distributors. His focus will be on strengthening Red Hat's regional ecosystem, enabling partners to bring Red Hat's open-source technologies to more customers and supporting organisations as they modernise infrastructure, scale AI initiatives and build more flexible hybrid cloud environments. Pavan brings more than three decades of experience in the technology industry, including over 20 years leading teams across Asia Pacific. Most recently, he served as Vice President and General Manager for Southeast Asia and Korea (SEAK) at Red Hat, where he led the company's business across the region. His appointment comes as enterprises across Asia Pacific are rethinking their IT strategies to support AI adoption, application modernisation and changing virtualisation needs. As customers look for greater choice, flexibility and consistency across hybrid environments, partners are playing an increasingly important role in helping organisations move from experimentation to enterprise-scale implementation.

Deep dive: automating netops with the cisco.catalystcenter Ansible Collection. As part of its Automating Cisco at Scale series, Cisco Systems, Inc explore how automating Cisco Catalyst Center with Ansible brings infrastructure-as-code practices to enterprise campus orchestration. Having previously established the groundwork with the Red Hat and Cisco partnership and examined Cisco Meraki, Cisco Systems, Inc now address the realities of campus scaling. Eliminating manual configuration errors requires a fundamental operational shift: treating your controller-managed campus network infrastructure as code. In today's IT landscape, this transition is no longer optional - it is necessary for long-term consistency and speed. Historically, network engineers automated campus networks through the command-line interface (CLI) - SSHing into devices, parsing raw text with regular expressions, and pushing structured configuration scripts. When Cisco introduced DNA Center (now Cisco Catalyst Center), the operational focus shifted from individual device management to centralized, controller-led, intent-based networking through a user interface or REST APIs. As enterprise networks scale, managing complex Cisco Catalyst environments through manual operations or custom, brittle API scripts is no longer sustainable. To help network engineers treat infrastructure as code, Cisco and Red Hat have delivered the cisco.catalystcenter Ansible Collection. Available through Red Hat Ansible Automation Hub, this validated collection provides a robust, enterprise-grade framework of modules, roles, and playbooks that interact directly with Cisco Catalyst Center through its APIs. High-Value enterprise use cases and playbook blueprints. The collection features more than 70 operational and configuration use cases, covered in more than 300 playbooks. The most impactful implementations solve high-friction enterprise problems. Day 0/1: zero-touch discovery and provisioning. Manual onboarding of branch devices is a significant bottleneck. Using the Cisco Validated Playbooks (CVP) and roles provided, you can automate the Plug and Play (PnP) onboarding process. Playbooks can programmatically design site hierarchies, allocate global and site-specific IP address pools, and assign device credentials. You can enforce standardized network settings - such as SNMP, telemetry, logging, and wireless profiles - uniformly across the enterprise before a device even connects. Example: The pnp_workflow_manager module automates the insertion of serial numbers into the controller's inventory database and immediately binds devices to the correct site layout. - - hosts: localhost gather_facts: false tasks: - name: Import and Provision Bare-Metal Switch via Plug-and-Play cisco.catalystcenter.pnp_workflow_manager: state: present configlist: - device_infolist: - serialNumber: "FOX2345X67Y" hostname: "BR01-ASW-02" platformId: "C9300-48UXM" authorize: true siteName: "Global/North America/Austin Office/Floor 2" Day 2: sd-access (SDA) fabric orchestration. Managing an SDA fabric requires precise configuration. The collection allows you to orchestrate the fabric entirely through code. Use cases include: * LAN automation: Automating underlay network deployments. * Fabric management: Programmatically managing SDA fabric sites, zones, and IP/SDA transits. * Virtual networks: Automating L2 VLANs and L3 Anycast Gateways, as well as seamlessly onboarding hosts and fabric devices. * Policy enforcement: Managing SDA extranet policies and application policies as code. Example: Instead of modifying configurations line by line across 500 switches, engineering teams can use Ansible to enforce global compliance tags. These tags trigger policies, dynamic network profiling, or group-based access-control policies within Catalyst Center. - - hosts: localhost gather_facts: false tasks: - name: Standardize PCI-Compliance Tags Across Controller Infrastructure cisco.catalystcenter.tag: state: present name: "PCI-DSS-Zone" description: "Applies Zero-Trust microsegmentation for POS terminals" register: tag_output - name: Output Operation Telemetry ansible.builtin.debug: var: tag_output.id Day N: software image management (SWIM) and assurance. Day N maintenance is critical for security and resilience. The collection transforms highly disruptive tasks into automated, scalable workflows: * SWIM automation: Automate the entire OS upgrade process. Playbooks can upload images, tag "golden" images by device family, and distribute and activate the images across the network. * Compliance and backups: Automatically check device compliance against Catalyst Center templates, remediate drift, and trigger scheduled configuration backups and restores. * Network assurance: Integrate automated troubleshooting by querying Catalyst Center for Device Health Score KPIs and ICAP settings, and execute Path Traces to identify routing or physical-layer issues. Example: The collection features hundreds of _info modules that extract system telemetry without raw command scraping. The following playbook fetches analytics on authentication health across an entire environment: - - hosts: localhost gather_facts: false tasks: - name: Collect Global AAA Service Analytics and Trend Data cisco.catalystcenter.aaa_services_summary_analytics: startTime: "1717804800000" # Epoch milliseconds timestamp endTime: "1717891200000" register: aaa_analytics - name: Assert Authentication Failure Rates are Below Thresholds ansible.builtin.assert: that: - aaa_analytics.failedRequests | int < 50 fail_msg: "AAA anomalies detected! Check Catalyst Center Assurance dashboard." Configuration generation and "state" Extraction. One of the most unique features of this collection is its Config Generator Roles, such as inventory_config_generator and sda_fabric_virtual_networks_config_generator. These roles allow platform engineers to query Catalyst Center and dynamically extract the current configuration state into structured data. This data can then be checked into a Git repository, enabling true GitOps workflows in which the Git repository remains the synchronized single source of truth for dynamic reporting and documentation. Engineering benefits: Automating Cisco Catalyst Center with Ansible. Integrating the cisco.catalystcenter collection with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) in your CI/CD or platform-engineering pipeline provides fundamental technical advantages over legacy scripting practices: * Eliminate "screen scraping": Legacy CLI automation depends on regular-expression tools such as TextFSM to convert CLI output into objects. If a Cisco IOS XE update changes a single whitespace character in show command output, your parser can break. This collection works exclusively with JSON structures natively supported by Catalyst Center APIs. * Adopt true infrastructure as code (IaC): Networks can be defined statefully in YAML files stored in a Git repository. A pull request that changes a site name or assigns a new configuration profile can trigger an AAP workflow, pushing changes reliably to production. * Synchronize multiple domains: Modern enterprise environments use platforms such as NetBox or ServiceNow as a single source of truth (SSoT). With Ansible, you can build unified workflows that fetch a newly allocated IP prefix from NetBox, register it as an enterprise IP pool through cisco.catalystcenter.ip_pool, and update a ServiceNow change ticket - all within a single orchestration run. * Abstract scale: A single Ansible task targeting the collection can execute a global policy update across thousands of downstream endpoints. The operator relies on Catalyst Center to handle the underlying concurrency, queuing, and edge-execution safety. Ready to build? Want to learn more? Explore Ansible for Catalyst Center on the Cisco Networking App Marketplace to see how automating Cisco Catalyst Center with Ansible can streamline configuration, compliance, and operations at scale. Developer advocate.