ITOps Reimagined through Intersight, the World’s Simplest Hybrid Cloud Operations Platform

At Cisco Partner Summit Digital this week, Cisco is unveiling an ambitious new vision of Cisco Intersight, which has already distinguished itself as the industry-leading infrastructure lifecycle automation platform with thousands of customers, a set of ecosystem SaaS capabilities and public cloud integrations. Cisco’s announcement this week evolves Intersight towards becoming the world’s simplest hybrid cloud operations platform for delivering and managing the full infrastructure stack, workload, and cloud automation.

Intersight is delivered as a modular SaaS architecture that enables us to continuously develop and deliver new features and capabilities. Intersight’s CI/CD development is a competitive advantage that enables us to take in customer feedback and iterate and improve rapidly.

Defining the Customer Problem

Our timing could not be better. There is no question that the world has been accelerating toward cloud expansion models and solutions and this year’s events have been further fueling this transformation. I’m already hard-pressed to find any customer who isn’t already operating in a hybrid cloud mode in some capacity. The implication of this megatrend for IT operations teams is that they must be able to perform tasks and deliver new services and innovation to support this transformation at a pace they have not been traditionally used to.

And building this new operating model requires IT, DevOps, cloud architecture, and application teams to work together more effectively. But this is easier said than done when each team uses different tools, has different and competing priorities, and key performance indicators for measuring their success. So, while IT has traditionally been on the forefront of managing their organization’s technology journey since the advent of cloud, they have sometimes been regarded as a hindrance to progress and a blocker of innovation, not an enabler.

Therefore, IT must rethink its approach to infrastructure and operations in being able to support how modern apps are built and managed. What’s needed is a new approach, that enables simplified management of disaggregated services and components, in a self-service manner, for infrastructure, workload, cloud, and application layers.

Intersight as the Bridge between Applications/Developers and Infrastructure

This is where the new and improved Intersight comes in. Intersight can help organizations connect a world of highly distributed infrastructure and applications while providing IT a single control point for simplified operations and enhanced agility. It also unlocks value from existing and new investments and continuously optimizes and accelerates service delivery to address business needs. In other words, it can help IT run its operations much like a public cloud service provider would.

We designed Intersight specifically so that application delivery and infrastructure teams can securely collaborate and work smarter and faster together, within and even across other technology domains. Intersight achieves this by automating lifecycle workflows and common telemetry, enabling consistency and governance with extendable, open capabilities that natively integrate with the third-party clouds, platforms and tools.

Intersight Workload Optimizer (IWO) exemplifies this. As a full-stack, real-time decision engine, Intersight Workload Optimizer can revolutionize how teams manage application resources across their multicloud landscape, significantly simplifying operations. It delivers unprecedented levels of visibility, insights, and automated actions. In fact, it is the first IT tool that connects infrastructure and apps tightly for users to take meaningful action. This means IT can fine tune application performance with costs and optimize resources in any application environment, without having to use multiple tools.

A good example of this is how Intersight Workload Optimizer can recommend ways to save on infrastructure and service costs by recommending specific changes, e.g. scaling up/down or moving virtual machines. And it can do this for both on-prem environments or within and across public clouds such as AWS. IWO’s ability to have complete context of both applications and their associated infrastructure, means it can proactively recommend changes and even automatically make capacity adjustments, such as scaling up whole VMs or even granular moves such as scaling up/down virtual CPUs within the VMs. Effectively, this means teams do not have to navigate the complexity of multiple different tools across different platforms, but just use IWO.

Intersight Kubernetes Service is another new service in the Intersight family. More and more customers are moving from an experimentation phase with containers to operationalizing them. However, this is challenging, and teams struggle with the complexity and the ability to scale, e.g. installing open source packages, configuring storage, networking, maintaining consistency between platforms and versions, etc. This can lead to delays, errors, and ultimately delays innovation. Intersight Kubernetes Service takes away all that pain. This service is designed to simplify Kubernetes with lifecycle management across hybrid cloud environments, powered by automation and a curated stack. This dramatically reduces time-to-market for provisioning Kubernetes clusters anywhere, while driving consistency and compliance for app developers.

Specifically, and with a few clicks, teams can deploy and configure 100 percent upstream Kubernetes on top of VMware ESXi hypervisors, and soon on Cisco HyperFlex Application Platform hypervisors and bare-metal servers. And with Intersight Kubernetes Service natively integrating with public clouds, they will be able to manage clusters across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud from the same dashboard for complete multicloud Kubernetes control.

Intersight Workload Optimizer and Intersight Kubernetes Service are only two services Intersight will deliver, along with Intersight Cloud, Intersight Virtualization and of course, Intersight Infrastructure services. We strongly believe that the modularity and openness of the platform will deliver much-wanted choice for our customers and reflect a valuable framework to simplify cloud operations and reduce complexity.

This is why I believe Intersight will enable infrastructure and application teams to be truly connected and aligned for the first time. Our goal is to enable our customers to smash organizational and technology silos across apps. and infrastructure and help them harness the full potential of hybrid clouds and confidently own their hybrid cloud journey.

For More Information

You can learn more about the new Intersight in my Business Impact session at Partner Summit Digital this week. But for a deeper dive into the architecture and the new features and capabilities, please sign up for the Intersight webinar that will feature an expert panel and a solution demo. This webinar will be available across all major geographies between Nov. 17 through 20.