Data centers for cloud computing are becoming increasingly complex to manage as service providers are faced with a growing number of subscribers, new applications, and bandwidth-intensive networking. Disparate user interfaces as well as static processes and agents that manage the heterogeneous physical and virtual network devices have an adverse impact on service quality, application delivery, and network resource utilization. These factors can drive up costs and contribute to poor subscriber experience.
Cisco Prime for Data Center Assurance is a single, integrated performance monitoring and fault management solution that helps address these challenges. As an integral component of Cisco®Unified Management, this scalable and simplified assurance management solution is tightly aligned with the Cisco Unified Data Center architecture and supports a breadth of premier data center network devices and platforms. (See Figure 1.)
Features and Benefits
Cisco Prime for Data Center Assurance helps provide the following benefits:
• Comprehensive service assurance and optimized resource management
– Proactive, unified monitoring and management of physical and virtual resources to help meet end-to-end service-level agreements (SLAs)
– Fast and easy access to comprehensive reports that help maximize the use of network capacity and resources
• Business agility through scalable and efficient operations
– Centralized access to integrated operator workflows and intelligent, automated management of cross-domains and tenants
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
– Preintegrated software components with standards-based northbound interface (NBI) for easy integration with third-party applications
– Unified, end-to-end multidomain management. Customers who have already deployed the Cisco Prime Carrier Management products to manage the access, aggregation, and core networks can easily make use of their investments when building out their data centers
Figure 1. Cisco Prime for Data Center Assurance
Simplified Management of Today's Highly Dynamic, Virtualized Data Center
The Cisco Prime for Data Center Assurance solution is based on a business-centered framework and an intuitive, workflow-oriented operator experience that provides simplified management of virtualized data centers. It is optimized for Cisco architectures and complements existing IT systems and tools. Cisco Prime for Data Center Assurance helps provide:
• Infrastructure Assurance: Management of physical devices, servers, network, and storage
• Services Assurance: Services and application lifecycle management and customer impact analysis
• Capacity Management: Compute resource optimization and future capacity planning
Components of Cisco Prime for Data Center Assurance Solution
Cisco Prime for Data Center Assurance includes the following:
• Cisco Prime Central: Supports operational integration and efficiency through unified management of multidomains and tenants and centralized mapping of resources to services.
• Cisco Prime Performance Manager: Provides fast, actionable performance metrics for network, storage, and compute to facilitate service assurance and capacity planning. It supports Cisco and multivendor devices, with custom and prepackaged reports that are easily extensible.
• Cisco Prime Network: Offers automated fault management for compute and network (both physical and virtual). Capabilities include virtual connectivity discovery, de-duplication, root-cause identification, and alarm reduction through topology-based correlation.
Services and Support
Cisco offers a wide range of services programs to accelerate customer success. These innovative services programs are delivered through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and partners, resulting in high levels of customer satisfaction. Cisco services help you to protect your network investment, optimize network operations, and prepare the network for new applications to extend network intelligence and the power of your business. For more information please visit the Cisco Services page on Cisco.com.
About Cisco Prime
The Cisco Prime portfolio of IT and service provider management offerings empowers IT organizations to more effectively manage their networks and the services they deliver. Built on a service-centered foundation, Cisco Prime supports integrated lifecycle management through an intuitive workflow-oriented user experience - providing A-to-Z management for evolved programmable networks, mobility, video, cloud, and managed services.
