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Choosing the right path for infrastructure lifecycle management
The AI era demands a new approach to operations
As the “AI tsunami” arrives, IT infrastructure must evolve from traditional, siloed environments to flexible, scalable, and intelligent ecosystems. Cisco Intersight® is the unified, cloud-native platform designed to meet this challenge, providing policy-based lifecycle management for your entire Cisco UCS® footprint across data center, colocation, and edge environments.
To help you navigate this transition, Cisco has simplified Intersight licensing into two primary tiers: Essentials and Advantage. This guide will help you understand the unique value of each and determine which path is right for your organization’s current needs and future goals.
The foundation for global visibility and health
The Essentials tier is designed for IT teams that need to establish a robust, reliable foundation for their compute infrastructure. It focuses on centralizing management and moving from reactive troubleshooting to proactive health monitoring.
● Who it’s for: server administrators and IT managers who need to maintain global consistency, automate basic hardware setups, and ensure maximum uptime through direct integration with Cisco support.
● Key capabilities
◦ Unified monitoring: comprehensive visibility of your global inventory, regardless of whether your servers are in a data center, a colocation facility, or at the edge.
◦ Proactive support: includes Cisco Connected TAC and proactive RMA, allowing Cisco to identify and resolve hardware and device issues before they cause downtime.
◦ Policy-driven configuration: using server profiles to help ensure that every server is configured to your “golden standard,” reducing manual errors and compliance risks due to inconsistent configurations.
◦ Energy consumption, insights, and control: accessing power-policy management and energy dashboards to monitor and optimize your infrastructure’s carbon footprint.
Advanced automation and ecosystem orchestration
The Advantage tier is for organizations ready to embrace full-stack automation and break down the silos between compute, storage, networking, and virtualization. It extends the power of Intersight beyond Cisco hardware into your entire IT toolset.
● Who it’s for: server administrators, IT managers, DevOps teams, and organizations managing complex, distributed environments who want to automate end-to-end workflows and integrate with third-party platforms.
● Key capabilities
◦ Ecosystem integration: seamlessly connects Intersight with the tools you already use, including ServiceNow for ITSM, Splunk® for analytics, and Red Hat Ansible or Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
◦ Advanced orchestration: uses the built-in Workflow Designer to automate complex tasks across your IT stack—including storage (NetApp, Pure Storage) and virtualization (VMware, Red Hat).
◦ Fleet management: specifically designed for Cisco Unified Edge environments, allows you to manage thousands of distributed sites as a single entity with zero-touch provisioning.
◦ Enhanced visibility: lets you gain deeper insights with advanced metrics, such as an enriched topology view with detailed alarms, error metrics, and networking bandwidth and utilization, and two years of historical data.
| If your goal is to |
Choose Essentials |
Choose Advantage |
| Centralize global inventory and health monitoring |
✓ |
✓ |
| Automate firmware updates and BIOS settings |
✓ |
✓ |
| Get proactive support and automated RMAs |
✓ |
✓ |
| Automate OS installations and storage provisioning |
|
✓ |
| Integrate with ServiceNow, Splunk, or Ansible |
|
✓ |
| Manage a distributed “fleet” of edge locations |
|
✓ |
| Orchestrate workflows across third-party hardware |
|
✓ |
The simple rules of thumb
● Choose Essentials if you want to master the lifecycle of your Cisco hardware.
● Choose Advantage if you want to master the lifecycle of your entire IT service delivery.
Flexibility that grows with you
Your infrastructure needs today may not be the same as they are six months from now. Cisco Intersight is built for that reality.
Mix and match for maximum efficiency
Intersight provides the granular flexibility to use both Essentials and Advantage tiers within a single account. Since licenses are applied to individual servers, you can tailor your management capabilities to the specific needs of each workload. For example, you might utilize Essentials for standard infrastructure nodes that require core hardware health monitoring and firmware management, while assigning Advantage to high-performance servers running complex AI workloads that require advanced workflow orchestration, deep data insights, and integration with third-party ecosystem tools.
Upgrade at any time: You are never locked into a tier. If you start with Essentials to secure your foundation, you can upgrade to Advantage at any time to unlock advanced automation and ecosystem integrations. This allows you to scale your management capabilities at the same pace as your digital transformation.
Try before you buy: Not sure which features you’ll use most? Every new Intersight account includes a 90-day free trial of the Advantage tier. This gives your team full access to the platform’s most advanced capabilities (including workflow orchestration and ecosystem integrations) so you can experience the value firsthand before making a commitment.
Transform your IT operations from reactive to proactive.
● Start your free trial: www.cisco.com/go/intersightfreetrial
● Learn more: See Essentials and Advantage licensing details, contact your Cisco account representative or visit cisco.com/go/intersight