Cisco Intersight provides intelligent cloud-based infrastructure management, configuration and orchestration with embedded analytics for the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Cisco HyperFlex platforms.

Intersight provides management as a service and is designed to be easy to implement and scale. Cisco UCS and Cisco HyperFlex systems are fully programmable infrastructures with a unified API, as illustrated in Figure 13-15. Cisco Intersight is API driven, so the platform and the connected systems are DevOps-enabled to facilitate continuous delivery. Users from operations and development teams can access the platform through portals that are designed for various personas.

Figure 13-15 Intersight Programmable Infrastructure

This platform enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools. This capability empowers organizations to deliver applications faster, so they can support new business initiatives.

Cisco UCS and Cisco HyperFlex platforms use model-based management to provision servers and the associated storage and fabric automatically, regardless of form factor. Cisco Intersight works in conjunction with the Cisco UCS Manager and Cisco Integrated Management Controller. By simply associating a model-based configuration with a resource through server profiles, IT staff can consistently align policy, server personality, and workloads. These policies can be created once and used by IT staff with minimal effort to deploy servers. The result is improved productivity and compliance and lower risk of failures due to inconsistent configuration.

Cisco Intersight is be integrated with data center and hybrid-cloud platforms and services to securely deploy and manage infrastructure resources across data center and edge environments. In addition, Cisco provides future integrations to third-party operations tools to allow customers to use their existing solutions more effectively.

Cisco Intersight offers flexible deployment either as Software as a Service (SaaS) on Intersight.com or running on your premises with the Cisco Intersight virtual appliance. The virtual appliance provides users with the benefits of Cisco Intersight while allowing more flexibility for those with additional data locality and security requirements.