Cisco Cisco Prime Cable Provisioning 5.3 Getting Started Guide

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At-A-Glance
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Cisco Prime™ Cable Provisioning is a distributed, highly 
scalable, and reliable solution for the management of 
cable subscriber devices and automated flow-through 
provisioning of the subscriber services that run on those 
devices.
What Problems Does It Help Solve?
In light of intense market competition and increased 
consumer choice in broadband services, cable 
service providers need to quickly roll out competitive 
differentiated products and services and must provide a 
high quality of experience for end users.
In addition, cable service providers are looking for 
ways to lower the support and other operating costs 
associated with device growth and new service 
deployments. In part, this device growth is being driven 
by the introduction into the market of new DOCSIS®, 
PacketCable™, and OpenCable™ standards and 
new technologies like IPv6, Ethernet passive optical 
network (EPON), and the associated standard, DOCSIS 
Provisioning of EPON (DPoE™). Cable service providers 
need an automated provisioning and management tool 
that supports these new standards and that simplifies 
and speeds the tasks of operating the network and 
provisioning cable subscriber services. 
Cisco Prime Cable Provisioning
A centralized platform allows cable service providers 
to control and configure network devices located at 
the customer premises, including DOSCIS residential 
home gateways, cable modems, set-top boxes, and 
media termination adapters (MTAs). Cisco Prime Cable 
Provisioning automatically recognizes devices, assigns 
the appropriate class of service, dynamically creates 
and generates device configuration files, and activates 
subscribers—all at extremely fast speeds.  
This single device management platform supports 
multiple technologies including DOCSIS, PacketCable, 
DPoE, OpenCable, and satellite.
What Are the Benefits of Cisco Prime 
Cable Provisioning?
•  Multistandard support: With a single platform, Cisco 
Prime Cable Provisioning supports high-speed data 
provisioning of DOCSIS cable modems, residential 
gateways and set-top boxes, and PacketCable voice 
provisioning of MTAs and digital voice adapters 
(DVAs). The solution also supports the OpenCable 
standard for digital cable set-top boxes and the 
newer DPoE standard for provisioning of EPON 
devices.
•  Reliability: Cisco Prime Cable Provisioning provides 
high reliability and high availability to meet business-
critical needs and help ensure minimum subscriber 
disruption. The solution offers multiple levels of 
redundancy through its distributed architecture of 
highly available regional distributed units (RDUs), 
multiple distributed device provisioning engines 
(DPEs) (each of which includes its own data-caching 
repository), a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) 
server, and a time-of-day (ToD) server. In addition, 
the solution includes support for avalanche protection 
to limit downtime after network outages. 
•  Scalability and high performance: Cisco Prime 
Cable provisioning is the industry’s most scalable 
cable device provisioning system, supporting 50 
million plus devices in a single customer distributed 
deployment. The solution uses multiple distributed 
device management and caching engines to balance 
processing of device requests and help ensure high 
performance. 
•  Support for rapid network expansion: A single RDU 
server in conjunction with the appropriate number of 
DPE groups can support a sustained rate of hundreds 
of thousands of new devices a day. This allows for 
a simple way to extend provisioning to additional 
subscribers and new markets, dramatically simplifies 
capacity upgrades, and lowers maintenance costs.
•  Easy integration into existing service provider 
systems: A flexible northbound interface promotes 
easy and secure integrations with existing service 
provider systems, such as billing, operations support 
systems (OSSs), workflow, mediation, and other 
customer management systems, through a Java 
provisioning or Web Services API. This, in turn, 
reduces operational costs and time to market for new 
services and helps accelerate revenue.
About Cisco Prime 
The Cisco Prime portfolio of enterprise 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, the Cisco Prime portfolio of products 
supports integrated lifecycle management through 
an intuitive workflow-oriented user experience. The 
portfolio of Cisco Prime solutions for service providers 
provides A-to-Z management for IP next-generation 
networks, mobility, video, and managed services.
For more information about Cisco Prime Cable 
Provisioning, visit 
, contact your local account representative, 
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