Cisco Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager 7.2 Information Guide
Q&A
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Cisco Data Center Network Manager 5.2
Product Overview
Q. What is Cisco
®
Data Center Network Manager (DCNM)?
A. Cisco DCNM is the recommended management system for Cisco Unified Fabric. It helps customers provision,
monitor, and troubleshoot data center network infrastructure. It provides visibility and control of the unified
data center, enabling service providers and IT departments to optimize for the quality of service (QoS)
required to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) for internal and external customers.
Q. What are the benefits of using Cisco DCNM?
A. Cisco DCNM increases overall data center infrastructure uptime and reliability, hence improving business
continuity. Focused on supporting efficient operations and management of virtual machine-aware (VM-aware)
fabrics, Cisco DCNM provides a robust framework and comprehensive feature set that meets the routing,
switching, and storage administration needs of present and future virtualized data centers. Cisco DCNM
streamlines the provisioning the unified fabric and proactively monitors the SAN and LAN components.
Offering an exceptional level of visibility and control through a single management console, or “single pane of
glass,” for Cisco Nexus
®
, Cisco MDS, and Cisco Unified Computing System
™
product families, Cisco DCNM
is Cisco’s recommended solution for mission-critical data centers.
Q. What challenges does Cisco DCNM address?
A. Cisco DCNM proactively monitors the overall health of the data center network and generates alerts when it
detects an issue that may negatively affect service. It identifies bottlenecks and predicts whether they will
occur based on historical trending and forecasting, thus helping with capacity planning. Cisco DCNM
automatically discovers newly added switches within the monitored fabric and keeps inventory of all its
components. The tool helps SAN and LAN administrators provision unified fabric through simple-to-follow
wizards that check configuration compliance before committing changes.
Q. What are the components of Cisco DCNM?
A. Cisco DCNM is composed of Cisco DCNM for SAN (formerly known as Cisco Fabric Manager) and Cisco
DCNM for LAN.
Q. How is Cisco DCNM for SAN different than Cisco Fabric Manager?
A. Cisco DCNM for SAN maintains all the features of Cisco Fabric Manager and adds new features such as VM-
aware management, Adobe Flex dashboards, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) management along
with other enhancements in reporting and performance troubleshooting.
Q. Why is Cisco Fabric Manager being rebranded as Cisco DCNM for SAN?
A. LAN and SAN management is converging in a virtualized data center. This convergence calls for unification of
the management plane to enable holistic management of the data center infrastructure. Recognizing the need
to support this convergence in management, Cisco is merging two best-in-class management solutions, Cisco
Fabric Manager and Cisco DCNM for LAN, into one combined unified product called Cisco DCNM. Cisco
DCNM can be licensed as Cisco DCNM for SAN and as Cisco DCNM for LAN.