Innovation is today's new constant. Innovation from open source, startups, the public cloud providers and companies like Cisco. The sheer speed, number and quality of choices at our fingertips offers unprecedented opportunity, but comes with a tax of rapidly increasing complexity. When operating models, tools and applications are splintered across multiple clouds, on-premises and in the public cloud - Dev teams and Ops teams carry the burden of that complexity.

This reminds me of a collection of remote controls I once had for my entertainment setup. I created a very intricate sequence -the right remote for the right system in the right order. It worked perfectly, until it didn't -until a new variable was added to the mix, like a new gaming console, or when I had to explain my "system" to new house guests. Thankfully, things are simpler now with some help from cloud services like Cloud DVR and Netflix, cloud connected devices, a common operating model and a richer UI (thanks, iPhone and Android).

My vision is a world where an organization's entire infrastructure -across on-prem, public clouds and the edge - operates with a common operating model, with perfect observability from applications down to infrastructure, common automation (or at least a common set of automation paradigms), common tooling for cloud native development, and a common vocabulary across teams.

Cisco is making this possible, and we're making it easier every day. Imagine one hybrid cloud platform that provides the automation, observability and cloud-native capabilities necessary to keep business, technology and teams connected and moving as fast as the market demands. That's what being "cloud smart" is about.

This week, Cisco is announcing a series of innovations across our portfolio of SaaS-delivered capabilities and cloud-optimized infrastructure to turn our cloud smart vision into a reality for our customers.

Cisco Intersight

Let's start with Cisco Intersight, the world's simplest hybrid cloud operations platform. Years ago, we had an idea about how we could make hybrid clouds better. We built the hybrid cloud operations model, the toolkit and the platform that Cisco runs on, and that would eventually become Cisco Intersight. We quickly realized that it was only the beginning, and our innovation engine has been moving at warp speed ever since.

• We added services like Intersight Workload Optimizer that used telemetry and analytics to help customers visualize workloads dependencies and optimize cloud and on-prem resources for performance and cost.
• We introduced the Intersight Virtualization Service to help customers manage physical and virtualized resources through a common plane.
• Then we launched the Intersight Kubernetes Service, a curated container as a service platform, understanding that our customers are building for a world of containerized applications on-prem and in the cloud.
• We've partnered to deliver the Intersight Service for HashiCorp Terraform, because we know that infrastructure as code is the future of cloud automation.

And now, with our Future Cloud announcement, we're moving up the stack to bring forward three new capabilities:

• Intersight?Cloud Orchestrator, which provides a low-code, easy-to-use framework for creating and automating complex workflows so IT Ops can easily?orchestrate infrastructure and workloads?and accelerate delivery of services.
• Intersight?Workload Engine, a powerful platform for modern, cloud native workloads, built on an open-source Kubernetes and Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) foundation, that uses container-native virtualization, and offers consistent SaaS management.
• Cisco Service Mesh Manager, a new extension to the Intersight Kubernetes Service, that brings deep observability and simplified management with policy-based security to visualize the services topologies across Kubernetes clusters on-prem and in the cloud.

We are delivering all this innovation with an eye towards helping our customers manage their on-prem and public cloud estates in a unified way. This means that when organizations run workloads on a private environment for reasons including performance, latency, physical security, cost efficiencies, architectural control -they don't have to sacrifice the operational simplicity they experience with the public cloud. And with the launch of Cisco UCS?X-Series, our next-gen computing system that's completely managed by Cisco Intersight, Cisco is bringing the cloud operating model to on-prem infrastructure platforms as well.

Cisco UCS^? X-Series

The UCS X-Series is the first x86 system exclusively designed for the age of hybrid cloud and the coming decade of industry innovation in computing. A first-of-its kind platform that blurs the lines between rack and blade systems, the X-Series is built for operations from the cloud and across the clouds, helping businesses improve operational efficiency, agility and scale.

UCS X-Series can be assembled from the cloud, shaped to workloads, continuously optimized, and integrated with the public cloud. Each UCS X Series chassis has a resource pool of over 600 cores today and headroom for the high-powered components you'll need over the coming decade. Our all-new X-Fabric technology connects these resource pools together, and operates at nano second latency, enabling over 35 million IOPs of traffic and easy future proof upgrades to emerging fabrics like CXL, optical interconnects and whatever else is coming.

Our engineering team rethought everything:  Power distribution, physical layout, cooling and airflow, making X-Series a smart choice for a sustainable future and a smart choice for higher performance. In other words, the X-Series is THE hybrid cloud compute platform for the next decade.

I could write this entire blog post about the incredible engineering that's gone into the most future-ready, versatile system ever delivered. There's an entire webinar dedicated to the UCS X-Series, and it's one you won't want to miss. Because this new system is so much more than a cool box. In fact, we're calling it the UN/Box. The Intersight delivered innovations are the keys to unlocking, and may I say unboxing, a world of possibility and promise. By making Cisco UCS X-Series part of the Cisco Intersight platform, we've built the world's first cloud-smart system that's ready for all incredible innovations we see on the horizon.

Cisco UCS X-Series utilizes 3rd gen Intel? Xeon Scalable processors, a balanced architecture with built-in acceleration and advanced security capabilities, designed through decades of innovation for the most in-demand workload requirements.

Let's UN/Box the future together.

Learn more

About Cisco Intersight

About UCS X-Series

Watch the latest Webinar: Meet the UN/BOX. Introducing Cisco UCS X-Series with Intersight

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