Cisco Launches "Powerful" Meraki-Like Data Center Platform for UCS, HyperFlex

Posted by CRN on September 21, 2017:

Cisco is bringing its wildly successful Meraki cloud-based management strategy to the data center with the launch of Cisco Intersight, an automation and management platform for UCS and HyperFlex that, Cisco claims, is unmatched in the server and hyper-converged market today.

"None of our current competitors in the server or hyper-converged infrastructure market offer the advantage of cloud-based management and extensibility for their compute systems that Intersight provides," said Scott Mohr, director of data center and cloud for Cisco's Global Partner Organization, in an interview with CRN. "What Intersight provides is the simplicity and saving that customers appreciate about the Cisco Meraki platform for networks. We're now applying that to the worlds of system management."

Intersight aims to simplify data center operations by delivering Systems Management as a service, cutting out the need to maintain islands of on-premises management infrastructure. The platform is designed to be intuitive from the start and will continue to learn and evolve over time, according to Mohr.

Brent Collins, head of global data center infrastructure for World Wide Technology, a Maryland Heights, Mo.-based top Cisco partner ranked No. 8 on CRN's 2017 Solution Provider 500 list, said one of the key aspects of Intersight is gaining critical insights from various data centers that can be leveraged "across the board."

"So instead of getting insights from just your data center they're going to pull … things that are working well with certain customers that they can then apply to other customers using data analytics, machine learning, things like that. I think that's going to be really powerful," said Collins. "So instead of just getting insight of one data center, you could spread that across every customer that is using that technology and enable them to take advantage of whatever insights you see across the board."