Cisco Intersight and UCS Director: Executing on Our Strategy

Cisco unveiled our strategy to revolutionize systems management last fall with our cloud-based management platform, Cisco Intersight. We are also continuing to enhance our private cloud platform, UCS Director. Here’s the latest update.

Revolutionary and Easier

When we announced Cisco Intersight last September, our customers enthusiastically responded to the revolutionary benefits we can deliver through a cloud-based systems management platform. However, our users made it clear they wanted the gains of the new platform without the pain of a significant transition. We listened, and Cisco is implementing the strategy we outlined in the launch blog; “…we have an approach that our customers can adopt one small step at a time.”

As Gautham Ravi, director of UCS product management, explained in a prior blog, Cisco has focused on “simplifying and automating the user experience”. We are executing on this strategy with both UCS Director and Intersight. The product management team incorporates continuous feedback from our users and industry experts as we implement our product roadmap.

Embracing the Customer Criteria

The recent enhancements to Cisco Intersight and UCS Director align with the customer criteria. Intersight is a software as a service (SaaS) platform, and we’ve been able to rapidly deliver new functionality without impacting I&O teams. The latest release of UCS Director, version 6.6, makes infrastructure orchestration significantly easier with new enhancements to workflows that enable a better user experience. (Read this recent blog for more details.)

A Strategic IaaS Evolution

UCS Director remains a strategic foundation for Cisco’s private cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS).  Cisco is creating a path forward to allow customers to transition to Cisco Intersight. This evolution will take time to implement, but we have started the process by introducing a UCS Director connector to Intersight in the 6.6 release. We are implementing the “one small step at a time” approach we described when we launched Intersight.

Beginning with version 6.6, Cisco UCS Director can be claimed as a managed device in Intersight, so usage data, license usage, etc. can be collected. UCS Director administrators can update UCS Director southbound connectors which are used to communicate with supported devices including networking and storage platforms during a maintenance window for rapid delivery of new features and functionality. This will enable users to leverage endpoint capabilities and APIs faster through UCS Director by enabling the update of device libraries.

This is a first step in the journey. Our goal is it to deliver on our objective of making it easy for our customers to transition from UCS Director to Cisco Intersight. We will offer an aligned product strategy that allows customers to preserve the investments they’ve made in infrastructure, operational processes, workflows, and licensing. As I&O organizations begin to enjoy the advantages of a SaaS systems management platform and simplified infrastructure automation with Intersight, they can begin to transition in a way and timeframe that makes sense to them.

Improving Support Using Advanced Analytics

Hundreds of customers are currently using Intersight. We recently started a pilot program with the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) and some of the Intersight customers. This pilot is part of Cisco’s support strategy of Connected Digital Experience (CDX) that includes machine learning and advanced analytics.  The data and incidents generated from the Intersight connected Cisco UCS and HyperFlex systems will be available for use by TAC to gain insights and provide more proactive support. We will be offering this new capability to all Intersight users in a few months, and we will provide more details at that time.

Intersight is continuing to evolve, and it will offer revolutionary new functionality and customer benefits. We encourage you to join us on this journey and begin using Intersight for free today by going to Intersight.com.

Join Us at Cisco Live

If you will be in Orlando next month please join us to learn more about the latest on UCS Director and Intersight

Session ID: PSODCN-1180
Title: Infrastructure Automation for Multicloud with UCS and HyperFlex

Time: Wednesday, June 13, 09:30 – 10:30 a.m.

For additional information read the UCS Director data sheet