Part I: Voyage to Intersight Managed Mode

Leaving the Known for the Unknown

This is a tale of three journeys. Like all journeys, you begin with an idea and a vision; then there is a voyage across a vast ocean; and, at last, you see terra firma! You set up shop and go about the business of building a new life, hopefully, better than the one you left behind. In three parts, I will tell you about the parallel journeys of a man, a company, and a technology. I am the man, Cisco is the company, and Intersight Managed Mode (IMM) is our new technology.

Exploring new worlds or opportunities means leaving behind the known to embrace the unknown. And new environments bring new challenges. But new worlds come with surprises-new flora and fauna; new landscapes and resources; new people and languages . . . the trick is to keep looking forward-keep your eye on the prize-regardless of obstacles and roadblocks. (And there will be plenty of roadblocks, especially if you're aiming high.) To survive, you must adapt. Not that I don't have a soft spot for the Luddites.

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Cloud Natives

They say people don't change-that a tiger can't change its stripes. Maybe a tiger can't, but a chameleon certainly can, especially if it's annoyed. If people didn't change, we'd still be holed up in caves, living on steak tartare. People, companies, and technologies evolve continuously. Not all change is optimal, of course. Your voyage may take you to America when you are trying to find India and that sort of thing.

Cisco has changed continuously since Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack pioneered the concept of a local area network (LAN) and a multiprotocol router system, in 1984. But not all Cisco's ideas have borne fruit. We all make wrong turns, but inertia and stagnation result in rust and decay. You get back up; you brush yourself off, and you keep on keepin' on-hopefully with some self-improvement. Stanford University did not like Sandy and Leonard's gadget. Cisco is now on the top 100 most successful companies in the world list. Follow your dream.

Today, we can either hop on that hybrid-cloud train or cling to our old ways of working and languish with the Luddites. Not long ago, most people didn't know what cloud computing, virtual reality, or artificial intelligence was. Now our infrastructures run virtual machines and increasingly rely on AI, and it's all managed by cloud natives.
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Cisco's Voyage from Routers to Hybrid Cloud Management

Once upon a time, Cisco made their first router. And from the beginning, Cisco did not just make good products, they made great products. Before too long, Cisco became the number one networking company in the world. And it was good.

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But why stop there? Cisco liked building hardware and exploring new technological domains. When Cisco set their eyes on servers, the naysayers said, "Mistake! Stay in your wheelhouse! You're not server guys!" They thought it was nuts to compete in a market owned and dominated by the likes of Dell, HP, and IBM, and they had a point. But Cisco had a unique perspective on servers, having been connecting them to each other, and to a lot of other things, for decades. So, another journey began, and, before long, Cisco became the number one blade seller in the world. And it was good.

But why rest on your laurels when there is a whole new hybrid-cloud world just dying to be managed properly? Cisco is all about innovation, superior technologies, and digital communication. And the hybrid cloud environment looked very enticing. Being the world's experts in connectivity; knowing how to make diverse technologies talk to each other; and being quite adept at designing and building next-generation infrastructure components led quite naturally to wanting to tie it all together, that is, figure out how to make our new hybrid infrastructures function as one synchronized, integrated machine.

In 2017, Intersight was born. Intersight leads the pack when it comes to managing on-prem and cloud-based infrastructure as one cohesive environment. This SaaS-based hybrid cloud operating model uses high-level automation to make your hybrid cloud environment simpler, more efficient, and more secure. You get faster service when you simplify and automate, but using a self-service speeds things up, as well. The Intersight platform offers a variety of services, and they all foster continuous integration/continuous delivery. It was designed as a modular system, so you can adopt services based on your requirements. Intersight enables your on-prem data center to be just as adaptable and secure as your public cloud environment. This breakthrough platform means that it no longer matters where you run your apps-where you happen to be or where your apps happen to be-what matters is how you run them.

Intersight was designed to enable development and network operations teams to "rely more on open-source tooling and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platforms to accelerate application rollouts." InfraOps and DevOps teams can now work together, using one common infrastructure management system. New low-code/no-code features in Intersight services, such as ICO, mean that tasks previously performed by specialized teams can now spread out and overlap. And this coordination and collaboration provide flexibility, better communication, and mutually successful outcomes.

The Intersight global dashboard monitors your servers and services-providing real-time health and compliance status and updates. It also makes recommendations (and automatically applies them if you choose that option). Intersight provides the most comprehensive integrated infrastructure visibility and monitoring available, with seven additional services. Each one offers features and capabilities to further address your specific requirements. New features for these services are rolled out monthly. So, Cisco went whole hog into the hybrid-cloud business. And it was good.

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Intersight Delivers the Motherload

But the voyage did not end there. In July 2021, Cisco released the most important Intersight Infrastructure Service (IIS) feature yet: Intersight Managed Mode (IMM). This new feature provides an architectural layer that manages the UCS Fabric Interconnected systems through a Redfish-based standard model. Now you can use a policy-based approach with Intersight to manage your servers.

IMM combines the impressive capabilities of the UCS systems with the cloud-based flexibility and resiliency of Intersight, streamlining the infrastructure management experience for standalone and Fabric Interconnect attached systems. Intersight Management Mode is a must-have tool for UCS server jockeys as it standardizes policy and operational processes for UCS-FI-6454, UCS-FI-64108, and Cisco UCS M5 and M6 servers.

Although I only recently became the IMM product manager, I've been involved with this technology since its inception, and I am very excited to tell you more about IMM in Part II, where I will provide information on how it works and what it will do for you. I might also tell you of my voyage to Cisco and IMM. Stay tuned for, Voyage to Intersight Managed Mode, Part II, coming up very soon!

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Please post any questions or comments below and I'll be happy to respond. Learn more about the birth and evolution of Intersight in this podcast.

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Hybrid Cloud Automation Webinar

If you are interested in more information and in gaining deeper insights, please join us for a live webinar: The State of Hybrid Cloud Automation from Industry Leaders. It will be led by our own SVP/GM of Cisco Cloud and Compute Organization, Kaustubh Das, moderating a distinguished group of executive and technical experts. The panelists will include:

• RedHat: Richard Henshall, Head of Product and Strategy (Ansible)
• HashiCorp: Amith Nair, VP of Product Marketing
• Puppet: Abby Kearns, CTO, Enterprise Portfolio

This webinar assembles representatives from the leading IT, cloud, and data center automation companies for an open discussion on the challenges and opportunities in driving automation end-to-end across hybrid clouds. Discussion topics will include a pros/cons evaluation on the different available automation methods for hybrid clouds focused on two areas-automating cloud migration and continued adoption of containers, AKA, containerization. space

pceRegister to Join our live webinar on hybrid cloud automation.

- September 28th from 10 am to 11 am Pacific Time -

The State of Hybrid Cloud Automation from Industry Leaders

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Resources:

IMM on YouTube: View our Intersight Managed Mode video playlist here. New videos are added on a regular basis.

DevNet Cloud Dev Center: Developers, see our latest hybrid cloud resources for Intersight: https://developer.cisco.com/site/cloud/

You can get started for free:

Getting Started with Cisco Intersight

Watch our Cisco Intersight demos here

Everything Cisco Intersight

IMM is a new feature that is part of the Intersight Infrastructure Service

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