Cisco today revamped its Intersight cloud management platform with support for Kubernetes cluster management and virtual machines (VMs) running in Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Intersight is a software-as-a-service platform that works in unison with on Cisco’s HyperFlex HCI and and USC-X server lines.

Today’s update enables customers to manage cloud-native workloads and VMs running in all major public providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — and local clusters running on RedHat’s OpenShift container platform or Cisco’s own Intersight Kubernetes Service.

In addition to Kubernetes clusters, the platform can now observe and manage virtual private cloud instances running in AWS’s EC2 platform.

“Through new multi-cloud and multi-cluster integration capabilities in Intersight, we are delivering a single pane of glass to observe and manage AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform container clusters with on-prem containers,” DD Dasgupta, VP of cloud and compute product management at Cisco, wrote in a blog post. “Our goal is to enable our customers to achieve consistency of operations and unified experiences across data center and different public clouds.”

Cisco also revamped its HCI server platforms in a bid to lower the barrier to adoption with lower introductory pricing and higher compute density.

Cisco claims it's effectively cut the cost of adopting HyperFlex in half by standardizing on a smaller subset of system SKUs. The updates also saw AMD score another victory over Intel, with the new Cisco systems pivoting to an EPYC-based processor architecture that was driven in large part by high core counts, Dasgupta told SDxCentral.

Alongside simplified product SKUs and lower pricing, Cisco added support for GPU nodes to its UCS-X series blade servers. The upgrades enable customers to deploy GPU blades in place of conventional server blades to satisfy growing demand for distributed GPU compute.

To support the higher bandwidth requirements of these systems, the vendor has pushed the integrated network fabric that interconnects each blade to 14.84 Tb/s of aggregate bandwidth.

“By delivering these capabilities in a common form factor we are simplifying computing operations and enabling customers to support artificial intelligence and machine learning, big data, virtual desktop infrastructure, software-defined storage, containers, and other apps and workloads from the same computing platform,” Dasgupta wrote.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify how and where Intersight operates.