IT infrastructure has become a monster. And to tame that monster, the industry has built complicated management tools that have become monsters in their own right, says a Cisco executive.

"If you think about this monster that customers have to manage -- their IT infrastructure estate -- they have had to build another monster to manage the monster," said Todd Bannon, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) director of product marketing for unified computing.

"We're asking customers to build a whole other infrastructure to manage the systems," Bannon said.

Cisco this week said it plans to tame the monster with Cisco Intersight, a subscription-based management and automation cloud for Cisco Unified Computing System data center servers and HyperFlex hyperconverged storage, along with Project Starship, a multi-year program to bring machine learning and AI to IT systems management.

Figure 1: Wrong Starship That's not Cisco's Project Starship. It's Starship Troopers, the movie.

Intersight and Project Starship leverage technologies from Cisco's Meraki business, which started out as a company Cisco acquired for managed WiFi, but has expanded to cloud-based enterprise management.

Cisco is looking to bring automation available in networking and storage management to server computing, Brannon says.

Intersight will be available in the fourth quarter in a base edition, available for free to all UCS customers, and as an Essential Edition for additional cost. The Base Edition features include global monitoring of health and inventory status; user customizable dashboards for different roles in the organization, such as storage, network, and compute management; tagging and basic search; and HyperFlex Installer to quickly deploy clusters. The Essentials Edition includes all the capabilities of the Base Edition, as well as simplified server setup and policy-based configuration; firmware management with scheduled updates; HCL compliance check and upgrade recommendations; and advanced global search and detailed inventory.

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