Cisco Prime Infrastructure
Converged Lifecycle and Assurance Management

Cisco Prime Infrastructure:

Accelerate business and network transformation with unified lifecycle management and application visibility.

Business and network transformation brings new challenges to traditional IT network management organizations. The proliferation of mobile devices and pervasive voice and video collaboration, along with cloud and data center virtualization, is driving the need for higher levels of service, application delivery assurance, and improved end-user experience and quality of service (QoS). Today's IT organizations must maintain business continuity and lower operational expenses while supporting these major transformations.

Cisco Prime™ Infrastructure addresses these challenges by providing a single integrated solution for comprehensive lifecycle management and application visibility that helps enable network managers to maintain, operate, and deliver applications and services that meet the demands for a better end-user experience.

Cisco Prime Infrastructure accelerates the rollout of new services and provides secure access and tracking of mobile devices, making "bring your own device" (BYOD) a reality for corporate IT. Tightly coupling client awareness with application performance visibility and network control, Cisco Prime Infrastructure helps ensure uncompromised end-user quality of experience. Deep integration with the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) further extends this visibility across security and policy-related problems, presenting a complete view of client access issues with a clear path to solving them.

Converged Simplified Lifecycle Management

Cisco Prime Infrastructure simplifies and automates many of the day-to-day tasks associated with maintaining and managing the end-to-end network infrastructure. The new converged solution delivers all of the existing wireless capabilities for radio frequency (RF) management, user access visibility, reporting, and troubleshooting along with network infrastructure lifecycle functions such as discovery, inventory, configuration and image management, compliance reporting, integrated best practices, and reporting. A new operational workflow model based on lifecycle processes aligns the product functionality with the way network operators do their jobs:

• Design - Assess, plan, and create configurations required to roll out new network services and technologies. Create templates used for monitoring key network resources, devices, and attributes. Default templates and best practice designs are provided for quick out-of-the-box implementation, automating the work required to use Cisco validated designs and best practices.
• Deploy - Schedule the rollout and implementation of network changes. This may include rolling out new configuration or monitoring templates created in the design phase, software image updates, and support for user-initiated ad hoc changes and compliance updates. This accelerates service rollout, minimizes chances for errors, and is highly scalable. In addition, Cisco Prime Infrastructure provides a simple set of guided and advance flows to bulk provision new devices including the converged access switches on the network and to push initial configuration to get the device functional and operational within a few minutes thereby drastically reducing the IT operational expenses.
• Operate - Predefined dashboards provide up-to-date status monitoring on the overall health of the network. Simple one-click workflows and 360-degree views enhance troubleshooting and reduce the time to resolve network issues. Unified alarm display provides actionable information and the ability to automatically open service requests with the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC).
• Report - Provides a wide variety of predefined reports for up-to-date information on the network including detailed inventory, compliance, audit, capacity, end-of-sale, security vulnerabilities, and many more.

Improve Application Delivery and End-User Experience

By converging lifecycle management and assurance, Cisco Prime Infrastructure delivers a 360-degree experience that empowers network managers to more effectively manage their network as well as the services their network delivers. Bringing device management capabilities into operational monitoring workflows provide a holistic, multidimensional view of the user, client, application, and network. This 360-degree experience helps network managers improve their responsiveness to business needs, identify and remediate problems quicker, and lower incident and problem rates.

Cisco Prime Infrastructure both configures and uses as a source of rich performance data embedded Cisco instrumentation and industry-standard technologies, such as Application Visibility and Control (AVC), NetFlow, Flexible NetFlow, Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR2), Medianet, Performance Agent, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), to deliver network-wide, application-aware visibility. It provides operations monitoring and quality of experience workflows that reduce instrumentation configuration and data collection complexity to quickly and easily gain insight into network and application performance. It also integrates with Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module (NAM) to permit the collection and correlation of granular flow- and packet-based data from one NAM or many, helping to enable deeper analysis and troubleshooting to rapidly solve challenging application and network problems.

Help Ensure Regulatory and Risk Compliance

Cisco Prime Infrastructure provides continuous compliance and auditing capabilities to help IT organizations monitor and assess their network and device configuration for out-of-policy configuration, and security and risk vulnerabilities. This includes Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) auditing of the wireless network, and network inventory auditing and reporting against Cisco advisories such as end-of-life and end-of-support for devices, OS versions and modules as well as Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) notifications.

Reduce Operational Expenses

Cisco Prime Infrastructure's scalable single-pane-of-glass solution significantly reduces operational costs by reducing the number of required management solutions.Cisco Prime Infrastructure scales to manage up to 13,000 devices of various types, including routers, switches, wireless controllers, autonomous access points, and the new Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series converged access switches and the Cisco 5760 Wireless LAN Controller. Ongoing support of new Cisco devices and software releases ensures device support parity within each device family, thus eliminating gaps in your management operations, especially when it comes to service availability and troubleshooting.

Cisco Prime Infrastructure offers both physical appliance and virtual appliance options for deployment flexibility without sacrificing scalability, ease of installation and setup, or serviceability and sustainability.