Cisco Intersight – Benefits for Edge Computing and ROBO

Cisco UCS and HyperFlex customers are experiencing significant benefits from Intersight’s cloud-based systems management in edge computing and remote office branch office (ROBO) environments as well as in the data center.

Extending IT Operations to the Edge

In the past three months we have introduced significant new Cisco Intersight functionality intended to make the deployment and management of Cisco UCS C-Series rack servers and HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure consistent and significantly easier. As a result of our software as a service (SaaS) model, Cisco is able to rapidly respond to customer requirements and implement new functionality that is available immediately.

As I explained in a blog on this topic last fall, IT organizations want to maintain consistency and ease of management in remote operations. They want edge and ROBO systems to be governed by the same set of policies, processes and governance mechanisms. As the number of devices and complexity of the environments increase, they require greater management simplicity.

The Intelligent Edge

IT organizations are implementing new digital business projects. These projects are supported by applications that create large amounts of data that can be processed more efficiently when the computing power is close to the sensor, system or person generating it. This is particularly true for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) applications. Edge computing solutions address this need for localized computing power. It is the reason why analyst firm, Gartner, recognized “the intelligent edge” as one of the Top 10 technology trends Impacting Infrastructure & Operations for 2018.

Kaustubh Das, Cisco’s Vice President of Strategy and Product Management for computing systems, described Cisco’s approach to managing infrastructure from the intelligent edge to the core in his recent blog.

We have taken a systems approach by designing UCS and HyperFlex from the ground up to deliver an easier way to deploy and manage IT infrastructure…Our management approach is designed to simplify operations and reduce administrative costs, by enabling new architectural solutions based on UCS to seamlessly integrate into existing environments. We are extending those principles to AI/ML infrastructure platforms as well.

Simplifying Management from the Edge to the Core

This video with Intersight and HyperFlex experts explains the benefits of being able to manage both Cisco UCS and HyperFlex systems from a common, easy to use portal.

Cisco has delivered significant enhancements to Intersight in the past 90 days. We wanted to help users understand the benefits of these new features, so we asked our technical marketing engineers to explain the functionality using demo videos in a series of blogs:

Automated configuration and management of Cisco UCS C-Series M4 and M5 servers

HyperFlex Installer for automated deployment of all HyperFlex systems

Automated firmware updates for Cisco UCS C-Series M4 and M5 servers.

The Intersight RESTful API and SDK

We’ve been pleased to hear comments from the hundreds of customers at small and large enterprises worldwide who have already started using Intersight. They are using it to manage their systems in edge, ROBO and data center environments and experiencing significant benefits.

At the same time our users are providing the development team with direct input that is informing the product roadmap. The lean development processes and SaaS architecture of Intersight allows us to develop and rapidly implement new functionality with minimal impact to our users.

You can learn more:

Intersight Communities page

Access the Intersight portal at intersight.com