Consolidating the physical and virtual infrastructures into a single domain to rapidly provision resources through all the components can be challenging in data centers. The solutions available in the market can provide some level of functionality and capabilities across some components but mostly fail to abstract the underlying infrastructure to automate them. They can interface with supported vendors but are limited with other management components. Cisco UCS Director (formerly Cisco Cloupia) can be a misleading name for Cisco UCS servers only, but it is a unique tool that can automate and orchestrate all the components such as network, storage, compute, and virtualization.

It is a robust and validated converged infrastructure solution that provides unified management, simplicity, and a comprehensive ability to automate all the components in the data center. Northbound and southbound API integration with device managers and third-party ecosystems makes it a more agile and powerful tool for data center automation and operations. It provides an HTML5-based web interface to end users, providing on-demand services through a self-service catalog, and can charge them based on a consumption model by leveraging existing compute, network, storage, and virtualization stacks under complete administrator control.