Unlock Agile Server Management for Simplified, Sustainable Operations

How customers are benefitting from Cisco Intersight

This is part two of a series of blogs on data center operations powered by Cisco Intersight. The first blog provided an overview of Intersight and its key capabilities. This blog covers the most popular use cases for which Cisco customers are deploying Intersight: server management and sustainable operations.

Server admins, I understand. In many ways, your job of managing the hundreds to thousands of servers in your environments has never been more difficult. We’re no longer talking about managing racks of servers across a few data centers. Today’s dynamic IT landscape is highly scalable and distributed by design. Server management now means dealing with complexities of hybrid cloud environments, supporting microservices-based workloads, and shifting more computing capacity to the edge—not to mention the ever-evolving cybersecurity threats. On top of all this is the mandate for IT organizations to run more efficiently, especially in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions.

I have heard this from the many customers I speak with firsthand. For example, a major healthcare software company we work with is currently planning to deploy thousands of new Cisco UCS servers, adding to the eight thousand systems they have already installed. This company is looking to simplify operations, including onboarding processes. They want to streamline both system configuration (day 0), to cut deployment time as much as possible, and system updates and the patching process (day 2).

Another example is a major regional bank that has deployed UCS servers in highly diverse environments—from data centers to campus offices and throughout more than one thousand branches it operates. This company’s IT organization wants a unified experience in operations and management across all these different environments so that its already hard-working staff can manage more resources centrally and remotely, as necessary.

Server management agility at a whole new level

With traditional server management tools, there is no question that companies like these would struggle to keep pace due to inherent operational inefficiencies that would cost them time and money. However, with the cloud-delivered power of Cisco Intersight, we can unlock new levels of IT agility by leveraging the power of the cloud and AI to simplify operations through advanced server management. This includes:

• Centralized management: Intersight provides a single, intuitive dashboard for managing all UCS servers in an environment, simplifying operations and reducing the need for specialized IT skills. Intersight builds upon the groundbreaking innovations introduced by Cisco UCS Manager, such as policy-driven management, and extends them to a broader range of environments. Intersight is also domain-agnostic, which can help customers like the bank I mentioned manage highly diverse, heterogeneous server environments—from data centers to the remote edge.

  These qualities enable scalability of things like virtualized servers. For example, Dakota State University deployed the UCS X-Series with 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors in order to support 40% more virtual machines per system. Dakota State relies on Intersight to manage the higher density virtual machines without a hitch, as noted by CIO Shawn Jaacks:

  “We used to have multiple people racking and stacking servers, but we’ve been able to shift some of those resources to more strategic, higher-value projects. Intersight gives us a single pane of glass to manage configurations, firmware updates, and policies across multiple environments, which has accelerated our deployments and day-to-day operations.”

• Automation and orchestration: Intersight enables automation of routine tasks like firmware updates, policy enforcement, and provisioning, freeing up valuable IT resources. Its intelligent orchestration capabilities streamline complex workflows, ensuring consistency and efficiency across the entire server environment. The result is a cloud platform that delivers a unified experience for managing diverse server infrastructure.
• Enhanced visibility and control: The platform also delivers deep insights into server infrastructure with real-time monitoring, performance analysis, and comprehensive reporting. The granular visibility from Intersight enables proactive issue identification and resolution, minimizing downtime and optimizing performance.

  Granular visibility and control underpinned the key use case for the deployment at Geographic Solutions, where overall computing performance increased by 30% and capacity by 54%, all through the combination of the X-Series powered by Intersight. The company managed to consolidate to 54 physical servers to support more than 3,000 virtual machines across three data centers. This environment is managed by a lean, six-person team, according to Director of Operations, Helvey Johnson:

  “The granular visibility and automation of Intersight is fantastic. Firmware updates that used to be implemented by several people over the course of multiple weeks are now completed in a weekend by a single person. We can push firmware and patches to all of our physical and virtual servers instead of updating them one by one.”

  

Sustainable to the core

Intersight also helps customers address another major use case of achieving more sustainable IT operations. With its role as the centralized operations platform, Intersight enables organizations to track, analyze, and optimize energy consumption across their infrastructure through:

• Real-time power monitoring and management: By providing visibility into power consumption, Intersight allows customers to identify inefficiencies and implement power-saving measures such as server consolidation.
• Policy-based power optimization: Intersight customers can set power policies to dynamically adjust server performance based on workload demands. This can minimize energy waste during low-utilization periods.
• Sustainability reporting: And of course, Intersight customers are able to generate comprehensive reports on energy usage that, in the future, will include data on carbon emissions. These capabilities are key to supporting compliance with sustainability regulations and corporate social responsibility initiatives. Our customers in Europe find this particularly useful.

Intersight: Catalyst for IT transformation in a nonstop world

Cisco Intersight is more than just a server management platform; it’s a catalyst for IT transformation. It simplifies operations and takes server management and sustainability to new levels of agility and performance. Intersight directly addresses important use cases that our customers have in their highly distributed and increasingly complex environments. With the power of a cloud-delivered operations platform that can continually evolve and improve, we are doing our part to help these customers keep pace in a world that never stops changing.

To give Intersight a try in your environment for enhanced server management, sustainable operations, and many other use cases, start a free trial today.

Try Cisco Intersight for free and experience simplified IT operations

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