IWO Boldly Goes Where No Service Has Gone Before – Cisco Blogs

Part Foresight, Part Hindsight

Intersight has gone further than any other hybrid cloud operations platform before because Intersight was created with 20-20 foresight as well as hindsight. We took what we’ve learned from the past, applied that to what confronts us in the present, and adapted the whole thing to what is coming towards us, at breakneck speed. Voila! Meet the hybrid cloud operations platform that lives at the intersection of what is and what can be. It is the only system that simplifies and improves the management of your entire complex hybrid environment on one easy-to-use, easy-on-the-eyes platform.

Since the creation of this flagship system, we have developed and released one revolutionary service after another as part of the Intersight suite. We now offer seven separate but complimentary services and we’re continually adding new features to enhance them. These tools do not just solve problems, they open portals to new possibilities. And we believe that we haven’t even tapped the surface of their potential.

Instead of remaining in reaction mode to the ever complex, ever demanding hybrid ecosystem—instead of putting out fires—the Intersight toolkit allows you to conquer this new frontier with assurance, clarity, and security. Intersight is the starship that travels boldly through your vast infrastructure, leaving no data unexamined, until your outer cloud makes peace with your inner cloud and all your frequencies are as harmonious as the Schumann Resonance.

Workload Optimizer Does the Heavy Lifting

Intersight Workload Optimizer (IWO), which launched last December, serves an integral function in our infrastructure management model. It was the first hybrid cloud service to be offered with Intersight. IWO is the industry’s first SaaS-delivered hybrid cloud observability and optimization service, and it was the first hybrid cloud service to be offered with Intersight.

It takes time to decide what workloads to run on which platform, make real-time changes to ensure optimal performance and cost across environments, and monitor and troubleshoot with minimum disruption. To optimize an environment end-to-end, earth to cloud and back again—you need access to a constant stream of telemetry from dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of sources. And as complexity increases in our hybrid cloud environments, more and more human resources are required to perform all these critical tasks. Unless, of course, your resource management is smart and automated.

SaaSy, Smart, and Future Friendly

And Intersight Workload Optimizer is smart and automated. It’s also unique. Unlike existing tools that app teams use to monitor application performance and ops teams use to monitor IT utilization—each in their separate silos—IWO provides deep full-stack visibility into both application performance and IT infrastructure resource utilization in one application. It monitors and maps complex application infrastructure interdependencies across the board. It manages your entire infrastructure—including physical and virtual hardware and software on premises and in the public cloud. IWO performs real-time analysis of infrastructure and application efficiency and performance, which improves your decision-making while reducing incidents and costs. The information and guidance IWO provides eliminates the guesswork and assists with your IT expansion efforts related to new requirements. When your resources are maintained at the correct capacity and accurately configured, performance is optimized. IWO glues a segmented and disconnected infrastructure back together, putting you in the pilot’s seat. It gives you a platform that can be managed by a team consisting of many skillsets, working together as a unit.

Recommended actions can be applied automatically or offered as suggestions. And you can run “What if” scenario modeling, to visualize your future options. Like Intersight’s other SaaS-delivered services, IWO is simple, elegant, and easy to adopt.

Intersight Workload Optimizer Dashboard

The Service That Keeps Giving

Intersight Workload Optimizer aggregates and analyzes data; tracks and monitors the broad ecosystem—including compute, cloud, storage, hypervisor, and application stacks; and suggests and/or applies its recommended changes. With IWO’s initial offering, we incorporated support for AppDynamics—a Cisco Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool. Using IWO in conjunction with AppDynamics provides end to end, app to infra, visibility and many of our customers now rely on the application-level insights it provides.

Our customers adopt new tools and technologies on an ongoing basis, and, to accommodate this, since IWO’s release, late last year, we have introduced several more IWO features and we will continue to roll out others, so stay tuned!

Today, we’re offering three more services, hot off the press. These capabilities will give you even more ways to comprehensively manage your end-to-end infrastructure and app stack through Intersight.

Let’s look at what’s new.

IWO NOW SUPPORTS NEW APM TOOL

Dynatrace — This is a third-party application performance monitoring tool. IWO now discovers applications managed by Dynatrace and includes information about those applications in its calculations for VM actions. This additional information results in superior resource utilization and improved overall application performance.

Selecting New Targets in Intersight

Adoption of public cloud and cloud-native technologies keeps growing. More and more of our customers are adopting public cloud offerings and the increasing services they offer. Considering that, IWO now supports AWS Savings Plans  and we’ve added a new feature to IWO’s bag of tricks—Container Cluster Optimization Planning.

IWO NOW SUPPORTS TWO NEW CLOUD-CENTRIC TOOLS

AWS Savings Plans — Many customers are leveraging AWS Savings Plans to better manage their cloud expenses, so, IWO now tracks and aggregates your AWS Savings Plans data and provides full access and visibility to your inventory and utilization, including a comprehensive view of Reserved Instances (RI).

Optimize Container Cluster Plan — We’ve expanded the IWO platform to include a new feature to optimize cloud-native applications, which can be run on an as-needed basis. Microservices architecture is commonplace, as are containers, and this tool provides enhanced visibility and better analytics of Kubernetes clusters deployed on premises and/or on the public cloud. IWO plan results display the optimal number of nodes to use, the appropriate pod density, and the CPU/memory capacity for best performance of the clusters.

I will provide more details about these new features and other capabilities in subsequent blogs in this IWO blog series. And if there is anything specific that you’d like to know more about, just let me know!

“Don’t let it end this way, Captain.”

Fair enough. Here are a few closing thoughts for a proper send-off.

This is how I see it; this is why I love these tools we’re creating. Ultimately, hybrid-centric services will allow business opportunities and technical possibilities to converge like never before, as new ideas emerge and technologies evolve. Yes, the hybrid cloud environment adds complexity and poses new risks—but it offers us an exciting way forward, allowing IT teams to play a more profound role. I see the hybrid cloud environment and the tools that manage it—like Intersight and the Workload Optimizer—as a means to an end with no end in sight . . . a bridge to a new frontier.

“You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, and irrational fear of the unknown. There is no such thing as the unknown. Only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.” —James T. Kirk

Resources:

Dive a little deeper into Intersight here

View our Intersight Workload Optimizer Demos here. (New demos are added on a regular basis!)

Developers, see our latest hybrid cloud resources for Intersight

Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer

IWO Documentation

You can get started for free:

Take advantage of our 45-day free trial to try out Intersight Workload Optimizer.

Find out for yourself why we’re so excited about it.

PS: Hear the Schumann hum here 😉

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