Good Friends Say Goodbye as Prime Infrastructure Sunsets

It is with great gratitude and appreciation that we wave goodbye to Cisco Prime Infrastructure. Prime Infrastructure has been helping customers manage their enterprise networks for more than a decade. The first Prime Infrastructure release was in 2011, and the latest and last version of Prime Infrastructure 3.10 was released in September of 2021. On March 31, 2023, Cisco is announcing the End of Life (EoL) for Prime Infrastructure.

Figure 1 – Prime Infrastructure EoL timeline

Cisco Prime Infrastructure provided comprehensive management of wired/wireless access, campus, and branch networks, as well as rich visibility into end-user connection and assurance of application performance. Prime Infrastructure was the first enterprise product to combine the network management of both wired and wireless under a single management application. Cisco Prime Infrastructure also set and raised an industry bar for compliance and reporting functions for network management systems (NMS).

The rise of Intent-Based Networking (IBN), Software Defined Networking (SDN), automation, AI/ML (AIOps), and the need for visibility into user experience and application experience has given rise to Cisco DNA Center.

Cisco DNA Center

Cisco DNA Center is the next-generation platform and continues to raise the bar on what network management should be. Cisco DNA Center provides the network management capabilities previously delivered by Prime Infrastructure but delivers a wide range of new and additional capabilities:

Figure 2 – Cisco DNA Center Pillars

Complete network management system: Cisco DNA Center provides a full range of network visibility and monitoring capabilities complete with discovery, hierarchy, topology, and a comprehensive reporting engine. Additionally, Cisco DNA Center provides a comprehensive collection of “360 views” offering insightful perspectives into overall network health, device health, user health, and application health.

AI/ML analytics platform: Cisco DNA Center leverages Cisco’s industry-leading AI network analytics engine, which brings together machine learning, clustering, machine reasoning, visual analytics, and decades of Cisco networking expertise. This results in the ability to deliver Dynamic Baselining, Personalized Anomaly Detection, Trends, Insights, Comparative Analytics, and Predictive Analytics.  This power combination puts Cisco DNA Center at the forefront of AIOps with unparalleled assurance capabilities.

Automation and Orchestration engine: Cisco DNA Center offers many automation workflows from device upgrades to configuration compliance, automated device onboarding, and troubleshooting. With Cisco DNA Center automation, customers have been able to gain efficiency, consistency, and scalability.

Software Defined Network (SDN): Cisco DNA center enables customers to deploy the Software Defined Access (SDA) with a fabric-based solution enabling a complete zero trust model with macro or micro-segmentation and eliminating many Layer2 limitations and dependencies often seen in legacy networks.

Endpoint identification engine, Cisco DNA Center provides advanced capabilities to identify and profile endpoints on the network providing next-generation endpoint visibility with AI-driven analytics and network-driven deep packet inspection.

Migration Options

Prime Infrastructure customers have two migration paths:

◉ Customer Managed Solution with Cisco DNA Center

◉ Cloud SaaS Managed solution with the Cisco Meraki Dashboard

Figure 3 – Cisco Network Management Options

For Prime Infrastructure customers who have not migrated to Cisco DNA Center, now is the time to start your migration to the new platform. Cisco provides the ability to run Cisco DNA Center in 3 form factors:

◉ Physical Appliance

◉ Virtual Appliance hosted on AWS public cloud

◉ Virtual Appliance hosted on a private cloud using VMware/ESXi

Migration Tools

Cisco has made available several tools to ease the migration process:

PDART – Prime to DNA Assessment Readiness Tool, you can run this tool on your Prime Infrastructure to check your migration readiness based on your specific Prime utilization.

Figure 4 – Cisco PDART Report Example

PDMT – Prime to DNA Migration Tool, this tool will automate the migration process by migrating your hierarchy, devices, maps, AP locations, and various other data elements to accelerate the migration from Prime to Cisco DNA Center and enable the customers to begin leveraging the value and advanced capabilities of Cisco DNA Center quickly.

Migration Services

Cisco offers a range of services to assist customers with the Prime Infrastructure to Cisco DNA migration; for more information about migration services, please contact your account team.

Source: cisco.com