Cisco aims to simplify server management for hybrid-cloud environments by offering a two-tier licensing structure for its Intersight infrastructure management tool with automation capabilities, along with a UCS X-Series servers and Intersight bundle for energy efficiency.

Intersight is Cisco’s cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that is designed to use machine learning, analytics, and automation to manage its entire server portfolio and hyperconverged infrastructure across data centers, clouds, and network edges. The networking giant initially launched Intersight in 2017, spinning it out of its Project Starship efforts.

Cisco reports that its Unified Computing System (UCS)  product currently has more than 16,000 customers, and that nearly 10,000 of them are using Intersight, which manages around 400,000 network devices, Dhritiman “DD” Dasgupta, VP of product management at Cisco’s cloud and compute business unit, told SDxCentral.

On top of Intersight, the vendor also offers the UCS Manager platform and UCS Central software for server management. However, for the new generation of M7 servers and beyond, Cisco enforces mandatory use of Intersight for management.

Dasgupta touted Intersight as a SaaS product that exempts customers from managing the management solution, which is “a fundamental philosophical change in how we thought about server management.”

For customers with earlier versions of Cisco servers, “we have taken all of the UCS Manager software code and integrated it with Intersight. So if a customer is used to using UCS Manager, they have the next three or five years to fully transition into Intersight managed mode.”

In a move to simplify the purchase and procurement process, Cisco consolidated Intersight's licensing from four tiers to two — Essentials and Advantage — with the latter including more automation capabilities.

The Essentials tier offers “basic server management with proactive capabilities” that automates day-to-day functions for a server, including inventory, license, and change management, along with Proactive Product Returns & Replacements (RMA), Dasgupta said.

He noted automation is one of the top favorite features for Intersight customers. And the Advantage offers another layer of workflow-based automation across hybrid clouds, which allows users to create operational workflows and automate day 0 to day N operations.

Cisco also partners with other network and data storage companies for automation capabilities including NetApp, Cohesity, Pure Storage, Hitachi Vantara, VMware, Red Hat, and ServiceNow, Dasgupta added.

Last November, Cisco announced the integration of the Intersight platform with Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based OpenShift Platform to simplify bare metal containerized workload operations in hybrid-cloud environments.

Cisco also introduced a UCS X-Series Energy Efficiency Offer that combines its latest servers with the Intersight management tool.

The vendor’s new 7th Gen UCS X-Series is powered by Intel’s 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors, which can reduce the number of systems compared to previous generation UCS servers with up to a 4-to-1 consolidation ratio, while supporting newer types of workloads. This delivers up to 64% better performance and 31% lower power consumption. Plus the Cisco Intersight provides customers with global control of sustainability policies, Cisco claims.

“This configuration consumes 50% less hardware over the lifetime of the product,” Dasgupta touted, adding that “Intersight maintains very granular data about usage patterns, about measuring all the different aspects of where and how power is consumed. And then through Intersight, we can do power profiling policy, dynamic power rebalancing, power allocation policy, [and] power capping policy.”