Product Overview
Cisco Prime™ Central helps service providers simplify the lifecycle management of evolved programmable networks (EPNs) and services. This product from the Cisco Prime portfolio provides centralized access to all components of the Cisco Prime Carrier Management suite of applications. Its tight integration among domain managers helps you to seamlessly and efficiently execute lifecycle tasks - including design, fulfillment, assurance, and analysis (Figure 1.) Cisco Prime Central’s comprehensive and integrated approach to management also helps accelerate time to market for revenue-generating services and provides outstanding quality of service (QoS) to help minimize customer churn. Plus Cisco Prime Central offers unified management of the entire network - from access to the data center - greatly improving operational efficiencies and lowering costs.
Features and Benefits
Features
● Out-of-the-box integration with Cisco Prime Carrier Management suite components, including Cisco Prime Provisioning, Cisco Prime Performance Manager, Cisco Prime Network, and Cisco Prime Optical
● Integration with the remote management system (RMS) - Cisco Broadband Access Center for Telco and Wireless (BAC-TW) for small cells access point inventory and fault monitoring
● Single sign-on access to cross-domain operator workflows with point-and-click provisioning, troubleshooting, and performance analysis
● Secure administrative management and control
● Data center dashboard and interface that facilitate customer and service impact analysis
● Automatic failover for local faults and geographic disaster recovery (DR) in both physical and virtual environments
● Support for standards-based northbound interfaces (NBIs) and integration probes
Benefits
● Simplified operations through unified management of access, transport, core network, and data center infrastructure
● Redirected assets for operating expenses (OpEx) to strategy and planning for new revenue streams
● Increased operational efficiencies through workflow consistencies and centralized management
● Enhanced business continuity through operational redundancy
● Reduced overhead and time for integration with operations support systems (OSSs) and other third-party products
Detailed Features and Benefits
Table 1 outlines more detailed features and benefits of Cisco Prime Central.
Table 1. Features and Benefits
Feature |
Details |
Benefit |
Architecture |
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Web-based interface |
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Consistent look-and-feel across workflow, processes, and tools
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Support for both traditional three-tier and Reach Internet Application (RIA) architectures
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Support for most popular web/application servers (including Apache Tomcat)
|
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Eliminates the need to install client applications and manage upgrades on multiple client machines
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Provides quick and easy access to components of the suite and the lifecycle service management tasks
|
Hardware platform |
●
Certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems
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Ability to run on both virtualized (tested on the VMware ESXi hypervisor) and bare-metal (nonvirtualized) machines for large-scale deployments
|
●
Offers deployment flexibility
|
Multidomain Managers |
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Consolidation of information across multiple instances Domain Manager instances
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Acts a single interface for OSS integration
|
●
Provide a single pane of glass across multiple domains and geographies
|
Operational redundancy |
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Automatic failover for local hardware and software faults, utilizing two dual node clusters
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Minimum disruption to the end user by allowing clusters to maintain their floating-point IP addresses
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High availability (HA) and geographic DR in both bare metal and virtualized environments
|
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Facilitates business continuity
|
Secure User Management and Administration |
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Single sign-on access to fully integrated cross-domain operator workflows |
●
Seamless access to the management components upon user authentication through a portal
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Point-and-click provisioning and centralized execution of service lifecycle management tasks
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No requirement for further authorization to access the different applications that are part of the Cisco Prime Carrier Management suite
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Integration with external authentication servers, supporting Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), TACACS+, and RADIUS plug-ins
|
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Provides simplified security through a central point of access for authentication and authorization control
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Increases operational efficiencies
●
Accelerates deployment of services
|
Common user management services with role-based access control (RBAC) |
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Assignment of user and group rights as well as association of roles/access rights to different components of the suite from a central location
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Robust mechanisms for authentication and password management
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Tracking and monitoring of executed tasks through audit logs
|
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Supports efficient rollout of role-based assignments for the entire suite
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Enhances security and facilitates compliance checks
|
Common suite administration and monitoring |
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Central administrative interface for all components installed as part of the Cisco Prime Carrier Management solution
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Seamless addition of new Cisco Prime Carrier Management components; does not require reinstall of Cisco Prime Central
|
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Offers operational simplification through centralized monitoring of the Cisco Prime Carrier Management components
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Reduces time-to-adoption of new components
|
Inventory Management |
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Common inventory management |
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A single inventory view of the entire network
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Role-based user navigation of physical inventory - all the way down to the domain manager that is managing the specific device
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Information on available/unused chassis slots and port line rates
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Advanced filtering and sorting capabilities
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Alarm information associated to inventory information
|
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Provides easy access to a single, detailed inventory view and the ability to use information shared by domain managers
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Prevents errors and unintended changes through role-based access and management
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Facilitates capacity planning
|
Grouping |
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Ability to associate resource inventory to a group statically or dynamically
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Fault information reported at grouping level
|
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Enables user to slice and dice resources and group them in a way that is meaningful to the specific task the user is assigned to
|
Event/Alarm Management |
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Common event/alarm management |
● Cross-domain event management, correlation, and de-duplication
● Single dashboard view and management of full alarm/event lifecycle without the need to access the specific domain manager
● Ability to navigate to the source domain manager for advanced troubleshooting
● Predefined reports and historical statistics, allowing operators to define user-customized reports
● Complete alarm lifecycle mapped from Cisco Prime Central to the source management application
|
● Drastically reduces troubleshooting time through cross-domain event management, correlation, and de-duplication, and a single dashboard view that provides detailed information on the faulty situation across all network layers of the transport network
|
Data Center Infrastructure Visibility |
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Customer and resource management |
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Ability to populate customer information through the UI or northbound system
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Ability to associate customer to physical or virtual compute resources as well as to services
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Customer 360-degree view, which provides meaningful information associated with a customer such as performance and alarms
|
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Assists in applications and services assurance to help meet SLAs
|
Customer and service impact analysis |
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Service inventory model aware alarm processing for compute, network, and storage
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Customer tagging for impact alarms
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Ability to navigate from customer/service impact alarm to root-cause analysis/symptom events
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Association of virtual machines (VMs) with customer information
|
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Assists in application and service assurance to help meet SLAs
|
Data center dashboard |
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Prebuilt dashboard for compute, network, and storage list and detailed views
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360-degree view: VM, hypervisor, cluster, storage, and virtual private network (VPN)
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“Top 5” reports on CPU/memory/IO latency/alarms
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Alarm and performance data available at fingertips
|
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Helps provide data center infrastructure assurance enabling visibility of use of network resources, and assist in future capacity planning
|
Mobility Visibility and Assurance |
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Assurance across physical and virtual environments for the mobile networks |
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Extended visibility from the physical Cisco ASR 5000 and ASR 5500 to virtualized network function (Cisco Quantum
™
Virtualized Packet Core) running on data center infrastructure
|
● Reduced OpEx in training costs while managing the mixed physical and virtual environments with the same tool
|
Integration with Cisco® InTracer |
● Integration with Cisco
® InTracer, a high-performance troubleshooting tool that provides critical session and application information, utilizing the data collection capabilities of the ASR 5000 mobile multimedia gateway platform
|
● Helps improve mobile service performance and meet stringent service-level agreements (SLAs)
|
Small cell access visibility and assurance |
● Fault collection from Cisco small cell access points
● Alarm notifications through SMS or email
|
● Simplifies operations through integrated fault management
|
OSS Integration |
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MTOSI 2.0 NBIs with OSSs |
● Data model based on TM Forum standards
● MTOSI 2.0 standards-based APIs for physical inventory
|
● Reduces time and cost of integration with external OSSs
● Simplifies integration with planning and inventory systems
|
Uni-direction and Bi-directional fault integration |
● Easy forwarding of traps to OSS applications
● Simple plug-and-play integration with IBM Tivoli Netcool applications (“Netcool ready”)
● Cross-domain correlation engine for forwarded traps
● Complete alarm lifecycle mapped from OSS to the Source Domain manager.
|
● Simplifies integration with external OSSs by reducing the flood of alarms
● Decreases time to resolution of network/service issues
|
System Requirements
Table 2 lists the system requirements for Cisco Prime Central.
Table 2. Hardware, OS, Database, and Web Client Requirements
System Requirements |
Description |
Hardware |
Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) B-series blade or C-series rack-mountable server, or equivalent third-party vendor hardware platform |
Virtualization |
VMware ESXi 4.1/5.0/5.1 |
Operating system platform |
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8, 6.5 with x86 (64 bit) |
Database |
Oracle 12c (12.1) database (external and embedded options for new installation. Support of Oracle 11g R2 for existing installation |
Web client operating system |
Windows XP (32 and 64 bit) and Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit) |
Web client browser |
Windows XP: Mozilla Firefox 17 Extended Support Edition (ESR), 20, 24 or 31 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, 10 or 11 |
About Cisco Prime
The Cisco Prime portfolio of IT and service provider management offerings empowers organizations to more effectively manage their networks and the services they deliver. Built on a service-centered foundation, Cisco Prime supports integrated lifecycle management through an intuitive workflow-oriented user experience- providing A-to-Z management for EPN, mobility, video, cloud and managed services.
Services and Support
Cisco offers a wide range of services programs to accelerate customer success. These innovative services programs are delivered through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and partners, resulting in high levels of customer satisfaction.
Cisco services help you to protect your network investment, optimize network operations, and prepare the network for new applications to extend network intelligence and the power of your business. Please visit the Cisco Services page on Cisco.com for more information.
Ordering Information
Cisco Prime Central is available for purchase through regular Cisco sales and distribution channels worldwide. Part numbers are listed in Table 3. To place an order, visit the Cisco Ordering Homepage.
Table 3. Ordering Information
Product Name |
Part Number |
Cisco Prime Central 1.x (eDelivery Option) |
R-PRIME1XCENTRALK9 |
Cisco Prime Central 1.x (DCT Top Level Ordering Use Only) |
PRIME-1XCENTRALK9 |
Cisco Prime Central 1.4 - Base Application |
CENTRAL-1.4-K9 |
Cisco Prime Central 1.x - Standby Entitlement (Redundancy Only) |
CENTRAL-1X-SBY |
Cisco Prime Central 1.4 - Lab Application (Not for Production Use) |
CENTRAL-1.4-LAB-K9 |
Cisco Prime Central 1.x - Tier 1 DSA |
CENTRAL-1X-T1-DSA |
Cisco Prime Central 1.x - Tier 1 Gateway |
CENTRAL-1X-T1-GWY |
Cisco Prime Central 1.x - MTOSI Northbound Interface |
CENTRAL-1X-MTOSI |
Cisco Prime Central 1.x - Domain Manager Probe |
CENTRAL-1X-DMPROBE |
Cisco Prime Central 1.x - Tier 2 Gateway |
CENTRAL-1X-T2-GWY |
Cisco Prime Central 1.x - Tier 3 DSA |
CENTRAL-1X-T3-DSA |
For More Information
For more information about Cisco Prime Central including a complete list of features and product specifications and the latest release notes, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/primecentral or contact your local account representative.