Cisco Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module 6.2 for Nexus 1100 Series White Paper

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Network Visibility in the Data Center:

Best Practices for Staying Ahead

upon application or service performance arising from other workloads and activity occurring
within or being delivered across shared resources, whether within the data center, cloud, or
distribution and access network layers.

4. Communicating and collaborating: In the old days, it was just fine if networks were monitored

and managed in a completely insulated and independent fashion, and monitoring data was kept
within the confines and control of the network operations group. But the organizational shift
towards service centric operations as well as the astounding rise in complexity of application and
infrastructure architectures is making cross-team collaboration and communications an absolute
necessity. As part of this, integrating network monitoring with a broader suite of management
practices, tools and technologies is becoming a related mandate, so that critical insights can be
brought to the fore and investigative/mitigating workflows can be truly optimized.

Collectively, network management and operations teams that embrace and successfully address these

four key best practice areas will be in position to fully support and assure a high performing, highly

reliable data center network. But even more importantly, they will be able to do so in a manner that

aligns with the most important and mission-critical applications and services that the network helps to

enable and deliver.

Cisco Network Analysis Module – Advanced Monitoring

for the Modern Data Center

As a globally recognized leader in data center infrastructure equipment and solutions, Cisco Systems is

in an excellent position to understand the scope of needs for monitoring and management of both the

network as well as the broader data center environment. In parallel with its infrastructure equipment

solutions, Cisco has developed a wide and growing range of management tools and technologies to help

practitioners deploy, provision, tune, optimize, and assure data centers successfully. One key component

within the management suite is the Cisco Network Analysis Module (NAM), which provides direct,

application-aware monitoring insights and visibility from the network perspective. Deployed either as

a blade in Cisco switches or routers, a physical appliance, or a virtual appliance, the Cisco NAM has

become a commonplace tool for network managers and operators.
The Cisco NAM solution was originally designed to function primarily as a troubleshooting tool

for the networking team, but has evolved to play a larger role in supporting data center operations.

Recent additions and enhancements to the Cisco NAM portfolio reflect this evolutionary path, and

are designed specifically to help networking and cross-domain teams keep pace and stay ahead of the

challenges, despite the changes that are happening in the data center.

Staying Ahead of Scale

The new Cisco NAM Integrated Services Module for Nexus 7000 (NAM-NX1) is the highest

capacity Cisco NAM solution ever, and is able to handle sustained traffic monitoring at over 30 Gbps.

Internal storage capacity of 900 GB supports substantial packet caching, and advanced hardware

and software filtering, much of which are implemented within ASICs for high performance, further

expand effective capacity.