Cisco UCS Manager and Cisco Intersight are major players in the data center management space. Cisco Intersight appears to have the upper hand with its advanced cloud integration and automation features.
Features: Cisco UCS Manager is known for its flexibility in managing storage, networking, and compute resources. It simplifies provisioning and enhances visibility, offering integrated management and reliability. Cisco Intersight, on the other hand, excels in cloud environments with superior workflow automation and manageability. It integrates well with platforms like Kubernetes and Veeam, with robust analytics aiding decision-making in hybrid cloud setups.
Room for Improvement: Cisco UCS Manager needs enhancements in upgrade processes, user interface simplification, and performance monitoring. Firmware upgrades present challenges, indicating a need for better processes. Cisco Intersight could advance hybrid cloud management and improve integration with non-Cisco products. Making automation more intuitive and enhancing provisioning for dynamic environments stand as recommended improvements.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco UCS Manager is mainly deployed on-premises, offering stability in traditional setups but necessitating technical expertise. Its customer support is praised for responsiveness. Cisco Intersight, available in hybrid and public cloud models, ensures seamless deployment over networks. Its cloud-centric approach enhances deployment, and its effective customer service, including automated systems, encourages positive user experiences.
Pricing and ROI: Cisco UCS Manager is viewed as more expensive than competitors like Dell or HP, yet it provides reliability with fewer hardware issues, ensuring cost savings in efficient management. Despite licensing fees, the value through bundled offers and effective ROIs is acknowledged. Cisco Intersight comes with competitive pricing options, ranging from free to paid licenses, proving cost-effective in hybrid environments, with overall satisfaction noted despite initial investment concerns.
It simplifies the onboarding of new hardware, reducing time spent on manual installations and configurations.
There's no need for an extra management device or virtual machine, as everything runs within the fabric interconnect.
Cisco UCS Manager provides cost savings by reducing the time support staff spend on long deployments.
For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX.
Cisco provides better support than anyone else.
Cisco technical support is helpful.
For a severity one case, a call ensures immediate assistance and resolution of the matter.
With Intersight, service requests are automatically generated, enhancing the user experience and providing timely resolutions.
Regarding Cisco tech, they are pretty good.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten due to its capability to manage multiple domains and automate service requests.
Cisco Intersight is scalable enough for our needs, allowing management in a multi-environment setup and working remotely while deploying servers.
Adding new chassis and extra blades is streamlined.
I would rate the scalability at nine out of ten, probably.
Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.
It is always accessible online, secure, and allows access from any location, following strict authentication standards.
If there's a really complex problem, I would probably give it a ten since it gets escalated quickly.
There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment.
It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like ChatGPT.
When registering our devices and servers using tokens, auto-detection could make it easier by automatically identifying resources and adding them to the platform.
We would benefit from advancements in AI that offer firmware recommendations automatically, reducing the need for human intervention and vendor communication.
It doesn't work straight out of the UCS, so someone who knows what they're doing is needed immediately, and it can be quite confusing.
While it has been improved from using Java to HTML, simplifying the tabs would enhance user experience.
The pricing is fair and reasonable, particularly for enterprises.
Cisco Intersight's license cost is very high compared to AWS and Azure solutions, which have lower initiation costs.
The pricing mechanism sounds fair.
Recently, we acquired an excellent bundle with significant discounts, with offers like buying three servers and getting one free, along with UCSC and fabric included for free.
As long as they can afford it, there is a setup cost involved.
This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.
It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure.
It also provides predictive analysis, predicting data leaks and making it easy to scale up servers remotely without requiring physical interference.
It supports ease of deployment, allowing for quick mass deployments in the data center, saving time and resources by doing so from a remote location.
Whenever there's a failure of any component, it's very easy to swap because you just disassociate that profile, remove the faulty blade, connect the new blade, and associate that profile, maintaining the same MAC address and worldwide port name.
One of the valuable features is the user interface base, specifically the C user interface.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Cisco Intersight | 1.6% |
| Cisco UCS Manager | 1.3% |
| Other | 97.1% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 7 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 8 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 18 |
Cisco Intersight is Cisco’s systems management platform that delivers intuitive computing through cloud-powered intelligence. This platform offers a more intelligent level of management that 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 achieve significant savings in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and to deliver applications faster, so they can support new business initiates. The advantages of the model-based management of the Cisco UCS platform plus Cisco Intersight are extended to Cisco UCS servers and Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco HyperFlex Edge systems. Cisco HyperFlex Edge is optimized for remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments.
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