Cisco Drives Simplified Operations and Energy Efficiency with Intersight and UCS X-Series

Introduction of new Intersight licensing and a new energy efficiency bundle

One of the privileges of my role is my frequent interaction with customers around the world as I did recently at Cisco Live EMEA in Amsterdam. With each customer meeting, I continue to build my library of insights that materialize as patterns of behaviors, opportunities, and issues that matter the most to our customers. Here’s what I’ve been noticing lately.

Customers want to simplify operations so that they can deploy infrastructure and workloads faster. Security is a top-of-mind issue, especially as the environments our customers are managing become more complex and distributed across different domains. Uptime remains a priority and customers are always looking to reduce or prevent downtime from hardware issues or infrastructure management tasks, such as firmware management. And, more recently, customers I meet with are looking at sustainability as a business-critical issue in both the technologies they deploy and for their operations as a whole. This was certainly the case in my meetings with European customers but I’m hearing more about this from customers in other regions as well.

Continued evolution of Intersight to drive simplified operations

We built Cisco Intersight as a platform to deliver unified experiences and simplified operations for today’s digital-first enterprises. It is a cloud-delivered lifecycle management and automation platform to operate compute, storage, and networking infrastructure resources across data centers, clouds, and to the edge. Intersight is constantly evolving and delivers continuous customer value by leveraging the agility, speed, and scale of a software-as-a-service platform that is both multi-tenant and API-driven.

A good recent example of this is our Intersight’s EMEA instance, which marks the first regional expansion to provide European customers key benefits such as data sovereignty, better performance, and lower latency. The EMEA instance is currently in technology preview and is expected to be generally available later this year. Intersight customers in general gain access to new levels of simplified operations for their top use cases that we have seen emerge including:

• Fleet management: Allowing users to organize and manage inventory spanning multiple device types deployed across multiple locations.
• Monitoring with proactive support: Logs and metrics collection about infrastructure health, performance, power consumption, utilization, cost to deliver analytics and predictive guidance.
• Automation: Allow user to create operational workflows and automate day 0 to day N operations.
• Sustainability: Visualize, monitor, and configure fine-grained controls to optimize power consumption, resource utilization & costs.

Simplifying Intersight’s licensing

Today, we are happy to announce that we are also simplifying the purchasing and procurement process for Intersight. Specifically, we are consolidating licensing from four tiers down to two, Essentials and Advantage, each with a suite of functionality and making it easier for our customers to select the right tier for their businesses.

• Essentials: Designed to enable full lifecycle operations with proactive support & service for use cases such as managing server profiles/policies, managing firmware updates, and proactive health monitoring & security advisories, along with many other capabilities.
• Advantage: Builds on all of the capabilities of Essentials with in-platform and ecosystem automation layered in for use cases such as low/no-code cloud orchestration, advanced server operations, multi-domain visibility, and third-party integration, e.g., IT Service Management (ITSM).

Accelerating energy efficiency with UCS X-Series + Intersight

We are also introducing a new offer that will simplify and accelerate how customers can deploy more energy-efficient computing systems and operations in one convenient bundle. The offer is built on the Cisco UCS X-series Modular System and its unmatched performance, unparalleled efficiency, and future-ready architecture that helps customers keep pace with and integrate the next decade of compute, fabric, and peripheral innovations such as liquid cooling and CXL (compute express links). The bundle also features Intersight with its advanced visibility, monitoring, and control capabilities including the ability to establish and apply granular power policies to all resources it manages.

As noted in a previous blog, the combination of the latest UCS X-Series and Intersight delivers powerful benefits in terms of energy-efficiency and simplified operations such as:

• Ability to “do more with less” by reducing the number of systems with up to a 4-to-1 consolidation ratio compared to previous generation UCS servers while supporting more and newer types of workloads.*
• Ability to reduce components, devices, and cabling through the new UCS X-Series Fabric architecture that can deliver up to 64 percent better performance and 31 percent lower power usage to previous models for greater efficiency and sustainability.*
• Ability to achieve sustainability from policies & management at scale through Cisco Intersight that provides customers with global control of sustainability policies as well as fine-tuned visibility and control of other operations.

The offer is available now to new X-Series customers including customers who have purchased previous generation UCS servers. Customers must purchase at least six UCS X210 compute nodes with an Intersight license subscription per node to qualify for a maximum of four free chassis and pair of UCS Fabric Interconnects per customer.

How to get started

Discover more information about the new Intersight licenses and the new energy efficiency bundle. The offer is valid for a limited time so act now!

* Results based on Cisco lab tests comparing UCS X-Series to UCS B-Series and C-Series

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