Cloud Computing

Good Friends Say Goodbye as Prime Infrastructure Sunsets

March 31, 2023

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It is with nice gratitude and appreciation that we wave goodbye to Cisco Prime Infrastructure. Prime Infrastructure has been serving to prospects handle their enterprise networks for greater than a decade. The first Prime Infrastructure launch was in 2011, and the newest and final model of Prime Infrastructure 3.10 was launched in September of 2021. On March 31, 2023, Cisco is asserting the End of Life (EoL) for Prime Infrastructure.

Figure 1 - Prime Infrastructure EoL timeline — Figure 1 – Prime Infrastructure EoL timeline

Cisco Prime Infrastructure offered complete administration of wired/wi-fi entry, campus, and department networks, in addition to wealthy visibility into end-user connection and assurance of software efficiency. Prime Infrastructure was the primary enterprise product to mix the community administration of each wired and wi-fi underneath a single administration software. Cisco Prime Infrastructure additionally set and raised an {industry} bar for compliance and reporting capabilities for community administration techniques (NMS).

The rise of Intent-Based Networking (IBN), Software Defined Networking (SDN), automation, AI/ML (AIOps), and the necessity for visibility into person expertise and software expertise has given rise to Cisco DNA Center.

Cisco DNA Center

Cisco DNA Center is the next-generation platform and continues to boost the bar on what community administration ought to be. Cisco DNA Center offers the community administration capabilities beforehand delivered by Prime Infrastructure however delivers a variety of latest and extra capabilities:

Complete community administration system: Cisco DNA Center offers a full vary of community visibility and monitoring capabilities full with discovery, hierarchy, topology, and a complete reporting engine. Additionally, Cisco DNA Center offers a complete assortment of “360 views” providing insightful views into general community well being, gadget well being, person well being, and software well being.

AI/ML analytics platform: Cisco DNA Center leverages Cisco’s industry-leading AI community analytics engine, which brings collectively machine studying, clustering, machine reasoning, visible analytics, and many years of Cisco networking experience. This ends in the flexibility to ship Dynamic Baselining, Personalized Anomaly Detection, Trends, Insights, Comparative Analytics, and Predictive Analytics. This energy mixture places Cisco DNA Center on the forefront of AIOps with unparalleled assurance capabilities.

Automation and Orchestration engine: Cisco DNA Center provides many automation workflows from gadget upgrades to configuration compliance, automated gadget onboarding, and troubleshooting. With Cisco DNA Center automation, prospects have been in a position to achieve effectivity, consistency, and scalability.

Software Defined Network (SDN): Cisco DNA heart permits prospects to deploy the Software Defined Access (SDA) with a fabric-based resolution enabling a whole zero belief mannequin with macro or micro-segmentation and eliminating many Layer2 limitations and dependencies usually seen in legacy networks.

Endpoint identification engine, Cisco DNA Center offers superior capabilities to determine and profile endpoints on the community offering next-generation endpoint visibility with AI-driven analytics and network-driven deep packet inspection.

Migration Options

Prime Infrastructure prospects have two migration paths:

Customer Managed Solution with Cisco DNA Center
Cloud SaaS Managed resolution with the Cisco Meraki Dashboard

Figure 3 - Cisco Network Management Options — Figure 3 – Cisco Network Management Options

For Prime Infrastructure prospects who haven’t migrated to Cisco DNA Center, now’s the time to start out your migration to the brand new platform. Cisco offers the flexibility to run Cisco DNA Center in 3 kind components:

Physical Appliance
Virtual Appliance hosted on AWS public cloud
Virtual Appliance hosted on a non-public cloud utilizing VMware/ESXi

Migration Tools

Cisco has made obtainable a number of instruments to ease the migration course of:

PDART – Prime to DNA Assessment Readiness Tool, you possibly can run this instrument in your Prime Infrastructure to verify your migration readiness primarily based in your particular Prime utilization.

Figure 4 - Cisco PDART Report Example — Figure 4 – Cisco PDART Report Example

PDMT – Prime to DNA Migration Tool, this instrument will automate the migration course of by migrating your hierarchy, units, maps, AP areas, and numerous different information parts to speed up the migration from Prime to Cisco DNA Center and allow the purchasers to start leveraging the worth and superior capabilities of Cisco DNA Center shortly.

Migration Services

Cisco provides a spread of providers to help prospects with the Prime Infrastructure to Cisco DNA migration; for extra details about migration providers, please contact your account group.