Picture this: A bug in new, non-validated network interface card (NIC) firmware that was applied unbeknownst to you is causing sporadic communication failures with your storage systems. This leads to infrastructure instability and cascading crashes of servers, databases, and apps, which impacts real-time operations.
How would you handle it? A traditional approach requires you to log in to multiple systems to search for the issue and manually intervene. Not only does it take too long, but the problem is often only temporarily solved. It could happen again and result in more downtime, related cost, and potential damage to your brand.
In fact, traditional operations just can’t keep up with the demands of modern IT infrastructure, especially when it comes to hybrid clouds and edge environments. Today’s challenges include:
- Supporting and deploying both traditional and new AI workloads
- Protecting against cyber threats that target outdated systems
- Managing energy use to meet sustainability goals
All while dealing with IT staffing shortages.
In short, the old ways of doing things just aren’t cutting it anymore.
There’s a better way: Cisco Intersight
Now, picture this: You log in to a cloud-based IT operations platform that gives you complete visibility into your entire environment. With unified dashboards, you can quickly perform root-cause analysis, gaining insights from both Cisco and third-party resources. You can eliminate configuration drift with policy-based remediation and continuously evaluate your systems to prevent issues from non-validated combinations of firmware, server models, processors, adapters, operating systems, and driver versions. Plus, you get real-time alerts about any potential problems.
“We can see and orchestrate all of the compute, storage, and networking systems in our data centers with Cisco Intersight, and it’s so easy to move things around. We can take excess capacity from one data center, move it to the other, and make it available to a customer within a day if they have an urgent need—all from a single console.”
Rod Lucero, CTO, Xigent
This is working smarter, not harder. We believe that smarter data centers start with consolidating and automating operations into a single infrastructure lifecycle management platform delivered as a service. Our solution, Cisco Intersight®, allows operations teams to log in to a secure, role-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Here, your authorized users can deploy and manage your global environment of on-premises and edge infrastructure assets throughout their lifecycle—all in one place. This includes existing servers for traditional workloads, new AI-optimized servers, and edge devices from both Cisco and third-party vendors.
What’s more, Cisco Intersight can be deployed 100 percent as SaaS, on-premises with cloud connectivity, or completely air-gapped, depending on your needs. No matter which option you choose, you get a consistent operating model across all three.
Experience the advantages of unified management
Cisco Intersight keeps your assets visible and managed in one place, so you can:
- Easily monitor the health and performance of all endpoint devices, both in real time and using historical metrics.
- Automatically receive security advisories and field notices custom to your environment, along with recommended remediation to address potential issues faster.
- Send logs automatically to the Cisco Technical Assistance Center to speed up issue resolution.
- Get proactive return material authorizations for faster hardware replacement.
- Act on alerts for hardware compatibility issues so you can keep your systems running smoothly.
We’re also helping IT operations teams like yours work smarter by automating repetitive, low-value tasks, allowing IT teams to focus on more strategic work and deliver infrastructure faster. Cisco Intersight achieves this in two main ways:
- Drag-and-drop workflow designer: A user-friendly workflow designer that includes a library of curated tasks and workflows for everything from initial setup (day 0) to ongoing operations (day N).
- Integration with third-party tools: Cisco Intersight integrates seamlessly with popular tools like Red Hat Ansible and HashiCorp Terraform so you can leverage your existing automation.
In addition to these benefits, Cisco Intersight can help you control server power consumption through policy-based power management and advanced controls. This includes dynamic power rebalancing, power allocation (capping) policies, and basic input/output system (BIOS) and operating system (OS) power policies. You’ll have real-time and historical metrics on power use and overall energy consumption at your fingertips, making it easy to track, measure, and report on energy use to meet your business objectives.
“Intersight has been instrumental in driving complexity out of infrastructure operations by simplifying consistent and repeatable deployments that efficiently deliver the right workload capacity at the right time.”
Michael Blake, Vice President of IT, PTC
Why choose Cisco Intersight?
Our vision sets a new standard for what data center teams should expect from a modern operations platform. The ideal platform should offer:
- Comprehensive server configuration: Manage a wide range of server types and generations in one place.
- Workload control: Oversee your critical workloads across data centers, remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments.
- Automation and orchestration: Execute tasks and workflows for servers, networking, storage, and virtualization faster and consistently.
- Open application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs): Integrate with third-party platforms to build the tool chain that fits your needs.
- Cloud flexibility: Provide on-premises and air-gapped delivery options for customers with these requirements.
Intersight delivers on each of these key elements and leads the market by providing the most comprehensive set of infrastructure lifecycle management capabilities for any unified computing system (UCS) server form factor and most generations in one place.
The platform supports new edge computing systems like our recently released UCS X-Series Direct as well as our new AI solutions. These include Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box and Cisco Validated Designs such as FlexPod Datacenter with Generative AI Inferencing and FlashStack for Generative AI Inferencing. Moreover, we’re evolving Intersight to include AI-driven features for predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and deeper automation for issue resolution as we continue to simplify operations and empower IT teams.
Take the first step to smarter data center operations—adopt an IT operations platform delivered as a service. Discover how Cisco Intersight can help you.
Start a free Cisco Intersight trial
Cisco Intersight seemingly provides insights to proactively prevent downtime