Cisco continues to invest and enhance our data center automation and private cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform, Cisco UCS Director. At the same time, we are leveraging the Cisco Intersight platform to deliver additional value and operational benefits when coupled with UCS Director.

Guest Blogger: Sri Hary Vengadasubbu, Cisco Intersight Product Management

Executing on Our Strategy

We introduced Cisco Intersight software as a service (SaaS) systems management platform that unifies the Cisco UCS rack and blade servers and HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure for our customers. In a series of blogs, the product management team has explained our strategy for helping our customers transition from Cisco UCS Director to Cisco Intersight. Here’s the list of blogs from the series:

UCS Director – A Strategic IaaS Evolution

UCS Director – Simplify Infrastructure Automation Anywhere

Cisco Intersight and UCS Director: Executing on Our Strategy

Investment Protection

Cisco is committed to delivering private cloud IaaS automation offered by UCS Director and in protecting our customers investments. A new Intersight Advantage edition to be announced shortly will include UCS Director, in addition to other capabilities, and it will extend customer’s investment protection as they transition to Cisco Intersight. Over time, the combination of UCS Director and Intersight will simplify day to day operations and extend private cloud IaaS services.

Bringing SaaS Benefits to UCS Director: Hybrid SaaS

One of the advantages of the Cisco Intersight SaaS platform is that customers get the benefits of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). This means they can realize the advantages of new, enhanced capabilities as they are made available every couple of weeks without creating additional work for operations teams. Customers using on-prem enterprise software like UCS Director traditionally go through a delayed patch and upgrade process. As a result, they do not realize the benefits of new capabilities for 3-6 months, or even longer, after a product release, due to delays in operational processes.

Starting with latest Cisco UCS Director 6.7 release, customers can now get SaaS and CI/CD benefits by simply “claiming” their UCS Director on-prem installation from the Cisco Intersight SaaS platform. This claim process enables a secure hybrid SaaS setup by associating the Intersight SaaS platform and your on-prem deployed UCS Director software, to deliver on-going new capabilities and benefits.

Better Together

As we continue to enhance Cisco Intersight and UCS Director functionality, this hybrid SaaS model provides significant better together benefits for our customers. The “symbiotic” relationship between Cisco Intersight and UCS Director 6.7 today delivers following benefits:

• Automated UCS Director patch/upgrade image delivery that allows customers to control their upgrades within operational processes and maintenance schedules
• Enhanced Customer eXperience (CX) where in Intersight SaaS enables Cisco TAC to streamline diagnostics log collection and expedited issue resolution for customer on premise installed UCS Director software

Cisco expects to deliver more “better together” benefits and functionality down the road, as we simplify data center automation and private cloud IaaS experience.  This will enable a smooth journey for UCS Director customers, as they leverage Cisco Intersight SaaS for better together benefits. These benefits are delivered with the great attention to ensuring security that Cisco offers for all our SaaS platforms. This video provides more details.

What’s New?

Cisco continues to deliver on our strategy with the latest release of Cisco UCS Director, version 6.7.  This release is another step in the private cloud IaaS evolution we described in this blog nine months ago. In this video we explain how to use Cisco Intersight SaaS platform to automate UCS Director update and patch image delivery.

The latest UCS Director 6.7 release includes an optimized multi-node architecture large scale Data Center automation and Private Cloud IaaS, strengthens security hardening across entire software stack, data base and enables Self-signed Certificate use. There are further enhancements to orchestration and automation functionality to allow cloning tasks, configurable loop task parameters, and full read access to orchestration tasks for the end-user portal.

UCS Director 6.7 also supports for the following:

• Automation Task Library for UCS firmware updates
• Cisco ACI 4.0, ACI Multi-Site Controller, Policy Based Routing (PBR) associated tasks/workflows, and more
• Red Hat Enterprise KVM guest customization
• VMware 6.7 vCenter certification

For more information see the following:

• UCS Director data sheet
• UCS Director compatbility matrix