Cisco Cisco Prime Infrastructure 2.0 White Paper

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While Cisco Systems is well known for its networking, compute, and collaboration products, important 

aspects of Cisco solutions that are often overlooked and underappreciated are the company’s management 

tools. EMA research regularly reveals Cisco’s management products are among the network management tools 

most commonly used by enterprises today, primarily because they are used to directly configure and maintain 

Cisco’s various infrastructure products. And yet, the Cisco management solutions suite is far more than simply 

an integrated set of element management tools. As an example, Cisco Prime Infrastructure has deep roots in 

element management but has been designed and architected to act as a fully functional operations monitoring 

and troubleshooting platform that spans technology domains and functional areas. 
The most recent release, Cisco Prime Infrastructure 2.2 (PI2.2), delivers a number of strong steps forward in 

terms of platform capacity as well as functional capability for assuring the health and integrity of enterprise 

networks. At a high level, the release has broadened the scope of the product’s management features to include 

data center technologies, has added a distributed architecture for managing large scale distributed infrastructures, 

and has continued Cisco’s track record of iterative improvements to workflow and ease of use. Some of the more 

specific areas of improvement are as follows:

 Cisco’s IWAN solutions are designed to allow flexible and consistent 

security and application performance across multiple types of WAN connectivity. New PI2.2 features unite 

visibility and control for IWAN features and capabilities. PI2.2 dramatically simplifies IWAN deployments 

by introducing IWAN workflows and flexible templates. Once in place, direct visibility into network and 

application performance will enhance service assurance. In the case of Cisco, this visibility is provided via 

embedded Cisco equipment features, such as Application Visibility Control (AVC) and Network-Based 

Application Recognition (NBAR). PI2.2 features for deploying and configuring network and application 

control functions such as Performance Routing (PfR), Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), network 

Quality of Service (QoS), and Dynamic Multipoint VPN (DMVPN) are just a few clicks away. This 

combination of visibility and control allows network engineers and operators to take full advantage of 

advanced embedded Cisco networking capabilities to optimize and secure the WAN.

 New for this release is the ability to view Layer 2 topology maps to reveal relationships 

and connectivity between networking devices (see Figure 1). 

Figure 1. Device and Site Connectivity