Cisco simplifies cloud-management licensing

Looking to simplify the way enterprises buy its software, Cisco has streamlined the licensing scheme for its Intersight cloud-operations management platform.

The SaaS-delivered Intersight package manages a variety of systems from Kubernetes containers to applications, servers, and hyperconverged environments from a single location.

Cisco said this week it was moving from a four-tiered licensing menu to one with two tiers named Essentials and Advantage.

Under Essentials, Cisco provides full lifecycle operations with proactive support and service for use cases including managing server profiles/policies, managing firmware updates, and proactive health monitoring and security advisories, Mahesh Natarajan, senior director of product management with Cisco’s Compute group, wrote in a blog. 

The Advantage package includes Essentials and adds platform and ecosystem automation for use cases such as low/no-code cloud orchestration, advanced server operations, multi-domain visibility, and third-party integration, such as IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms, Natarajan stated.

In addition, for a limited time Cisco is offering up to four USC X-Series Chassis and a pair of Fabric Interconnects, along with up to 40% off Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer (IWO), which monitors workload consumption, costs, and policy constraints across cloud resources.

To be eligible, enterprises must purchase at least six UCS X210 compute nodes with an Intersight license subscription per node to qualify for a maximum of four of the chassis and pair of UCS Fabric Interconnects per customer, Natarajan stated.

These are all elements of a roadmap that Cisco says can lead enterprises to enable more energy-efficient infrastructure using fewer devices. The compute nodes are housed in the chassis. The Fabric Interconnects unite servers into a single management domain and connects them to the LANs and SANs within the domain. IWO dynamically recommends and initiates automated actions to ensure that on-premises and cloud IT resources match the real-time demand of application workloads.

Cisco recently added new high-end X Series servers: the four-socket UCS X410c M7 and the two-socket UCS X 210 M7 that are based on Intel 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors.

The processors are more powerful and more energy efficient than the previous generation, and that translates into fewer systems doing the same workload and using less. In some cases, that means cutting the number of systems required by three quarters while reducing power consumption 31% over existing models, according to Cisco.

“The ability to achieve sustainability from policies and 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,” Natarajan stated.