In the series of Presidio Inspires blogs, we bring to our readers topics that span different technologies and solutions top of mind in today’s world. With Cisco, the technology we provide customers is often more impactful than any of us can imagine. It’s the ability to impact people with technology that is driving digital transformation.
One customer that comes to mind for impactful digital transformation is a top-tier Children’s Hospital in the US, which provides children from all over the country lifesaving services.
Presidio and Cisco have been supporting a Children’s Hospital for over ten years. The Hospital has been running Cisco UCS for all of its mission-critical applications for more than six years. Presidio worked with the customer to ensure that they began running as efficiently as possible. Now they monitor their UCS environment leveraging the SaaS-based tool, Intersight, to help them identify and respond to their users.
This technology allows a Children’s Hospital to run as efficiently as possible to make sure they serve their patients with the best care they can provide. Presidio continues to work closely with the Hospital providing professional and managed services to help them with their needs.
Like the Children’s Hospital, most companies’ existing data centers simply cannot compete with the cloud’s elasticity, mobility, and availability. We are managing hybrid cloud architectures that span private data centers, and the public cloud is challenging. So is optimizing them for cost and performance.
In a bid to cater to customers faced with these hybrid cloud challenges, Cisco is evolving its hybrid and multi-cloud management platform, Intersight, in ways that could make it a more compelling solution for companies that need to manage private data centers and public cloud resources at the same time.
Intersight: UCS and HyperFlex Management Simplified
Cisco’s SaaS-based portal for monitoring UCS and HyperFlex is called Intersight. But Intersight does more than just monitor systems—it can predict and anticipate problems, and it can help you proactively address those problems. Intersight is also connected to Cisco’s TAC (technical assistance center), which streamlines support. It removes delays and manual steps, and it uses predictive analytics and machine learning to gather insights from TAC case history, customer configuration, and Cisco best practices. Next, it synthesizes the information to provide practical guidance to fix and anticipate problems.
Cisco has now extended Intersight into application decision monitoring, known as Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. The full-stack decision engine built into the Cisco Intersight Workload optimizer can be used for on-premises or public cloud infrastructure and applications. The combination of Intersight and IWO is unique to Cisco, and customers can benefit day one from this technology. Intersight can be accessed from any device, including your mobile device, and it can even manage third-party storage products such as Pure Storage FlashStack solutions.
Closing Thoughts
Presidio is helping companies and inspiring them to move to understand the benefits of the cloud. Often cost savings are a top draw for moving workloads to the cloud; that’s often not the primary driver for edge deployments.
While Cisco’s approach is an industry gamechanger in many ways, it’s not a cheaper alternative to the cloud. Then again, most business owners and IT professionals understand that anything that makes life simpler and improves flexibility costs money. That’s not to say that when you reach capacity with storage, RAM, or a processor and can add components rather than replace an entire appliance, there are no cost-saving moments. But at the end of the day, this business strategy is driven by other business benefits. When getting information within minutes—or seconds—matters; the last thing you want to do is send data across the country only to hope the results are returned quickly.
To date, Cisco probably hasn’t been among the first names to come to mind when you think “hybrid cloud.” But the company is doubling down on its investment in this space, which means that businesses with hybrid strategies will enjoy yet another way to unify cloud operations and management within hybrid architectures.
Are you interested in learning more?
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