UCS Central lets IT managers control a globally distributed UCS infrastructure comprised of multiple domains, with the ability to ensure service and configure service profiles, ID pools, policies and firmware, Cisco says. UCS Central also has an XML API for integration with third-party systems management and cloud orchestration tools.

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Cisco's existing UCS Manger product governs a single domain, made up of and all the UCS and network access components it manages. UCS Central requires UCS Manager for local domain management while UCS Central provides tiered management for the global infrastructure.

UCS Central also aggregates server inventory, fault information and notifications across multiple domains to facilitate service assurance of the UCS infrastructure. The XML API also integrates Cisco's Intelligent Automation application with UCS Central for the creation of global UCS service profile templates across data centers.

Third parties writing to the UCS Central API include Compuware, for control of application performance across data centers, private, public, and hybrid clouds; Cloupia, for the ability to replicate between multiple sites for disaster recovery; Zenoss, for discovery, monitoring and managing UCS performance and capacity utilization; ScienceLogic, for surveillance of multi-tenant data centers; and Splunk, for gleaning operational intelligence from Big Data generated by thousands of UCS servers.