What is Cisco Intersight?

Cisco Intersight™ is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) hybrid cloud operations platform that delivers intelligent automation, observability, operations, and optimization to customers for traditional, cloud-native, and hybrid IT infrastructure and resources. It supports the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) and Cisco HyperFlex™ hyperconverged infrastructure, Cisco® networking platforms, virtualization and container platforms, third-party servers and storage, public cloud platforms and services, and other integration endpoints. Because it is a SaaS-delivered platform, Intersight functionality increases and expands with weekly releases.

With Intersight, you get all of the benefits of SaaS delivery and full lifecycle management of distributed infrastructure and workloads across data centers, remote sites, branch offices, edge environments, and public cloud platforms. This empowers you to observe, analyze, optimize, update, maintain, and automate your environment through a unified platform in ways that were not previously possible. As a result, your organization can achieve significant TCO savings, delivering hybrid IT infrastructure, resources, and applications faster in support of new business initiatives.

For Cisco infrastructure, the Intersight platform works in conjunction with Cisco UCS Manager, Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC), and Cisco HyperFlex Connect. In addition, Intersight integrates with third-party storage, servers, public cloud services, virtualization, container platforms, and other SaaS services. You can simply associate a model-based configuration to provision servers and associated storage and fabric automatically, regardless of form factor. Using profiles, IT staff can consistently align policy, server personality, and workloads. These policies can be created once and used to simplify server deployments, resulting in improved productivity and compliance, and lower risk of failures due to inconsistent configuration. In addition, Cisco provides integrations to third-party operations tools, such as ServiceNow, to allow customers to use their existing solutions more efficiently.

Figure 1 : Infrastructure Services Support the Entire Life-cycle

Key benefits of Cisco Intersight infrastructure services

  • Simplifies daily operations by automating many daily manual tasks

  • Gives you the convenience of a SaaS platform with the ability to connect from anywhere and manage infrastructure through a browser or mobile app

  • Allows you to stay ahead of problems and accelerate trouble resolution through advanced support capabilities

  • Provides global visibility of infrastructure health and status along with advanced management and support capabilities

  • Easy to upgrade to add workload optimization and Kubernetes services