Cisco Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager 6.1 Bulletins

Page 1 of 5

White Paper

Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager 6.3

Product Overview

Modern data centers are becoming increasingly massive and complex. Proliferation of new technologies such as

virtualization is adding yet another level of complexity while enabling higher workloads to be placed on the network.

Innovations such as Cisco

Unified Fabric unify storage and data networking to deliver convergence, scalability,

and intelligence with reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and faster return on investment (ROI). IT departments

today are challenged to look beyond traditional silos of networking and storage to manage this converged,

virtualized data center as a service. Meeting this challenge calls for unification of the management plane to enable

holistic management of the data center infrastructure.

Cisco Prime

™

Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) provides centralized management of both Ethernet and

Fibre Channel networks in context of compute and storage array devices (Figure 1). This converged view enables

network and storage administrators to analyze health and performance, regardless of the protocol used, across

platforms running the Cisco NX-OS Software operating system, which is used by the Cisco Nexus

and Cisco MDS

9000 Families. The supported protocols and overlays include Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE),

Ethernet, IBM Fibre Connection (FICON), Small Computer System over IP (iSCSI), Cisco FabricPath, and Cisco

Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV). Cisco Prime DCNM simplifies deployment of SAN and LAN components

through wizard- and template-based provisioning and configuration. Role-based access control (RBAC) helps

separate configuration of LAN and SAN networks on converged network switches. Cisco Prime DCNM supports

TACACS+, RADIUS, and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) remote authentication protocols to help

manage user access to the network and provide an audit trail of the changes made by the user.

Figure 1. Converged View of Ethernet and Fibre Channel Networks in the Context of Compute and Storage