Cisco Intersight – The Benefits of Essentials

A primary design goal of Cisco Intersight is to simplify and automate IT operations. Cisco Intersight – Essentials delivers on this objective with significant new advantages to Cisco UCS and HyperFlex customers.

Guest Blogger: Gautham Ravi, Director, UCS Product Management

Pervasive Simplicity

One of the challenges of management at scale is keeping things simple. When we first began developing the requirements for Cisco Intersight, our customers told us we needed to address the tedious tasks associated with maintaining systems. We had to simplify and automate many activities. I described this fundamental requirement as the customer demand for pervasive simplicity in a previous blog. Cisco Intersight – Essentials is designed to address many of these issues, such as updating firmware and making deployments more efficient.

We wanted to explain how we have designed Intersight to make management of Cisco UCS and HyperFlex easier, so we developed this video to summarize some of the benefits.

Automating Updates

The process of updating and maintaining firmware at the right levels can be very time consuming. This is particularly true for customers with systems in multiple locations. However, it is critical to apply updates in a timely and consistent manner to ensure security and compliance.

Cisco Intersight – Essentials addresses this issue by providing automated firmware updates for Cisco UCS C-Series servers. You can set policies to automatically update your rack-mount servers wherever they are located. We also support functions like UCS C-Series policy-based configuration with Service Profiles and virtual KVM to make remote provisioning and management easier. Here’s a link to an Intersight Communities page, if you’d like more technical details.

We’ve also created this demo video to explain how the automated firmware update feature works.

Streamlining Deployments

Many of our HyperFlex and Cisco UCS customers support systems in remote locations. They wanted it to be easier to roll out new systems and transition to hyperconverged infrastructure. We recently added a new HyperFlex Installer that dramatically simplifies deployments. This blog provides you with more details.

Cisco Intersight is cloud-based management as-a-service, so we will constantly be rolling out new functionality and making it immediately available to our customers. We are just getting started.

Try It for Free

You can take advantage of the benefits of this new platform today at no cost by trying the free 90 day trial of Cisco Intersight – Essentials. Just go to the Intersight portal at intersight.com and logon using your Cisco ID. There’s also a getting started video to help you.

 

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For additional information:

• #CLEUR: If you’re attending Cisco Live Barcelona this week, learn more about the Cisco Intersight by stopping by the demo booth in the Data Center zone.
• If you can’t join us at Cisco Live, please go to www.cisco.com/go/intersight