Cisco has unveiled a new management and automation platform for Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and Cisco HyperFlex Systems, Cisco Intersight. Intersight aims to simplify data center operations by delivering systems management as-a-service (MaaS), alleviating the need to maintain islands of on-premise management infrastructure. Intersight will being using machine learning, analytics, and automation to deliver its system lifecycle management.
Cisco has unveiled a new management and automation platform for Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and Cisco HyperFlex Systems, Cisco Intersight. Intersight aims to simplify data center operations by delivering systems management as-a-service (MaaS), alleviating the need to maintain islands of on-premise management infrastructure. Intersight will being using machine learning, analytics, and automation to deliver its system lifecycle management.
Typically customer data is spread out in some combination of data center, private cloud, public cloud, or multiple clouds. This being the case, companies need a scalable and consistent management environment across their data centers, private clouds and public clouds deployments. Enter Cisco Intersight with not only the aforementioned capabilities but also the ability of consistent management and policy enforcement across bare metal server environments, converged infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure.
Having data distributed over multiple locations isn’t the only thing that has changed in recent years. Application architectures are also transforming with scale-out and multi-site deployment models, delivered by containers and micro-services. In addition, DevOps accelerates the rate of application development and continuous feature delivery. Intersight has been designed to address these issues as well.
Benefits and features include:
- Pervasive Simplicity: Cisco Intersight features a dynamic user interface that can be customized by user role. As a cloud-based service, new functionality is delivered via portal updates without burdening customers with upgrades, and the experience scales seamlessly as customers directly connect new systems for management. The platform is designed to constantly learn to help make daily IT operations easier. Analytics combined with tight integration with the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) constantly improve the assistance provided through the recommendation engine.
- Expertise: tight Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) integration and insights from Cisco and the UCS Community provide recommendations and best practices.
- Continuous Optimization: The ability for the Intersight platform to provide actionable intelligence will grow stronger over time from the power of cloud-based machine learning. It can learn from the collective experience of the UCS user community, as well as the best practices of Cisco experts and peers. This will enable better predictive analytics and resource utilization to be provided through the recommendation engine.
- Agile Delivery: IT can rapidly respond to business demands and frequent changes while maintaining the policy enforcement designed to implement safe and reliable business services Cisco Intersight is API-driven and Cisco UCS and HyperFlex are fully programmable systems, supporting development and operations tool chains for continuous integration and delivery.
- Constant Protection: The Cisco Intersight service adheres to the stringent security standards of Cisco InfoSec, and helps enable secure communication between the Cisco Intersight SaaS platform and managed endpoints, allowing applications to be deployed and updated securely.
Cisco Intersight will be offered in two different editions:
- The Cisco Intersight Base Edition will be available at no charge. It includes global health monitoring and inventory, a customizable dashboard, the HyperFlex Installer to quickly deploy clusters, and the ability to context-launch the UCS Manager, IMC and HyperFlex Connect element managers.
- The Cisco Intersight Essentials Edition includes all the functionality of the Base edition as well as policy-based configuration with service profiles, firmware management with scheduled updates, Hardware Compatibility Listing (HCL) compliance checks and upgrade recommendations, and other features.
Availability
Cisco Intersight is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year. It is integrated and designed to coexist with existing UCS and HyperFlex management tools, so customers can adopt Cisco Intersight as they desire without added complexity. Cisco Intersight will be available in an on-premise deployment model in the future.
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