Cisco announced Cisco Intersight, a management and automation platform for Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and Cisco HyperFlex systems. The announcement marks the beginning of a long-term strategy designed to align IT innovations with competitive business needs. Cisco Intersight simplifies data centre operations by facilitating 'as-a-service' systems management, eliminating the need to maintain 'islands' of on-premise management infrastructure, according to a company press release.
"Today, most IT departments are adopting a multi-cloud strategy, so they need a scalable and consistent management environment across their data centers and public and private clouds," explained Cisco. The goal of Intersight is to offer the ability to connect and manage all these environments comprehensively.
In turn, multi-site and scale-out deployment models, enabled by containers and micro-services, are transforming application architectures, whose development is also accelerated by DevOps methodologies. Among other features, Cisco Intersight includes a dynamic user interface that can be customized on a role-by-role basis. "In turn, analytics combined with tight integration with Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) continually improves the support provided through the recommendation engine," a press release said.
Cisco Intersight is based on APIs and Cisco UCS and HyperFlex, which are fully programmable systems, supporting development and operations processes to ensure continuous delivery and integration. Cisco Intersight integrates with Cisco InfoSec security standards, and helps establish secure communication between the Cisco Intersight SaaS platform and managed endpoints, facilitating secure application deployment and updates.
Cisco Intersight will be available in the fourth quarter of 2017, and will co-exist with existing UCS and HyperFlex management tools so customers can deploy it as they wish. The first two versions available will be Cisco Intersight Base Edition, which will be free; Cisco Intersight Essentials Edition, which includes all the functionality of the Base Edition plus policy-based configuration with service profiles, firmware management with scheduled updates, Hardware Compatibility Listing (HCL) compliance checking, and update recommendations, among other capabilities.
In addition, recalls an official press release that "Cisco recently announced the fifth generation of UCS servers, which includes the high-performance UCS M5 range and a version of UCS Manager with Cisco Intersight integration capability".
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