Cisco unveiled Cisco Intersight, a management and automation platform for Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and Cisco HyperFlex Systems, marking the start of a multi-year strategic program to provide customers with clear IT advantages that support their competitive business goals. Cisco Intersight simplifies data center operations by delivering systems management as-a-service, alleviating the need to maintain islands of on-premise management infrastructure. Complete system lifecycle management is delivered by Cisco Intersight through machine learning, analytics and automation.
Today, most IT organizations are adopting a multicloud strategy, and as a result customers need a scalable and consistent management environment across their data centers, private clouds and public clouds deployments. Customers also seek consistent management and policy enforcement across bare metal server environments, converged infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure. Cisco Intersight will deliver the unique ability to connect and manage all of these comprehensively.
“Organizations that move to cloud-based systems management platforms will find that service delivery quality is significantly improved, the overall risk to the business goes down, and IT staff productivity is increased,” said Matt Eastwood, Senior Vice President, IDC. “Artificial Intelligence (AI) –infused cloud-based management tools can offer deep insights into the state of the infrastructure, identify troubles before they become major issues, and enable quicker ‘root cause’ identification and analysis of issues.”
Cisco Intersight will be available in Q4 2017 and 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. Cisco Intersight is built on an extensible architecture with OData standards-based RESTful APIs and connector framework simplifying third party software and hardware integrations.
Cisco recently announced fifth generation UCS Servers with the high-performance UCS M5 series and an accompanying release of UCS Manager that provides connector support to Cisco Intersight. UCS M5 systems are also now available in Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution with the new Cisco HyperFlex M5 nodes, including HyperFlex Edge, with Cisco Intersight providing cloud-based cluster deployment capability in the Base Edition.