Cisco Intersight: 5-year anniversary

Monitoring Cisco UCS, HPE ProLiant, and Dell PowerEdge servers from one place

Transformational infrastructure management platform

When we introduced Cisco Intersight, in late 2017, our vision was to not just transform data center-based management of Cisco UCS servers into a SaaS-assisted management paradigm but to transform the way IT managed devices in the data center. The core value was always to help our customers fully gain the benefits of SaaS delivery along with end-to-end lifecycle management of distributed infrastructure and workloads across data centers, remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments.

In order to do this, we had to evolve Intersight from a SaaS management plane to a full platform that could deliver multiple disparate services. We started down this path a couple of years back when we worked with our storage partners to bring Pure Storage, NetApp, and Hitachi devices under Intersight management, while fully complementing the native management provided by our partners.

Evolution to third-party server support

Following that success, our customers asked us to extend similar benefits to servers beyond UCS and help complement other server vendor management tools. In fact, in an internal survey over 92% of respondents believed our current customers would like to use Intersight to monitor third-party infrastructure. Since we had already paved the way to managing servers using standard Redfish APIs, we were able to extend some of that functionality to certain Dell and HPE servers. We recently announced a tech preview for the same, and will be offering the following functionality:

• Inventory view consistent with UCS servers
• Power and Boot source setup actions in UI
• Support based on Redfish standards implemented in vendor firmware

This allows our customers to start visualizing and monitoring their server assets in the data center with Intersight. As stated earlier, this does not replace any of the tools from other compute vendors but will complement them. This is just the beginning of the functionality we can provide our customers, and as we develop more capabilities this can extend to increasing the number of day 2 operations that administrators can perform on their compute environment.

Get started today

If you don’t already use Cisco Intersight, I would urge you to take a test drive today at www.intersight.com, and kick-start your 90-day free trial.

Not a Cisco Intersight customer? Learn more here.

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