Cisco has reduced the number of licensing options for its Intersight operations platform to two as part of an effort to make the software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing on-premises and cloud computing environments more accessible.
In addition, Cisco has added a Cisco UCS X-series Modular System to its portfolio based on a two-socket server configured with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and an instance of Intersight that has been extended to make it possible to apply policies that limit energy consumption.
Mahesh Natarajan, senior director of product management of cloud and compute for Cisco, said Intersight is a complement to the management platform the company already bundles with its Unified Compute Systems (UCS) platforms for on-premises IT environments.
Essentials enables management of server profiles/policies, managing firmware updates and proactive health monitoring and security advisories along with many other capabilities. The Advantage option adds low-code/no-code orchestration, more advanced server operations, multi-domain visibility and third-party integration with, for example, third-party IT service management (ITSM) platforms.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a shift toward cloud-based platforms that make it simpler for IT teams to centrally manage multiple IT environments from anywhere. Cisco Intersight, in addition to supporting Cisco servers, has been integrated with cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft to achieve that goal.
In fact, as the management of IT continues to converge across multiple platforms, the concept of a data center has become something of a misnomer, said Natarajan. Integrated application workloads are now routinely distributed across on-premises and cloud computing platforms that are simpler to manage using a consistent set of policies, he added.
A SaaS platform also provides the added benefit of reducing the total cost of IT because the need to deploy management platforms for each environment is sharply reduced, noted Natarajan.
Very few organizations are running all their application workloads in one environment, so the need to reduce costs by finding more efficient ways to manage IT operations is becoming a more pressing issue. Most IT teams are trying to limit the number of full-time employees they might otherwise hire by trying to improve the overall productivity of the teams they do have.
Of course, centralizing the management of IT is as much a cultural challenge as it is technical. Each IT team that deploys a workload on a platform has a natural bias toward using the management framework made available by the platform provider. Each of those platform providers is now extending its reach as part of an effort to become the one control plane that rules them all. Cloud service providers, for example, are extending the reach of their management frameworks into both local data centers and edge computing environments.
Regardless of preferences, the cost of licensing multiple management platforms can quickly become prohibitive, especially if they provide redundant capabilities. Organizations looking to reduce the total cost of IT would much rather reduce licensing costs than lay off the IT staff that drive a wide range of digital processes. The challenge, as always, is getting everyone in the IT organization to agree on what that one management platform should be.
