Highlights: Cisco Prime Network Services Controller at Cisco Live Orlando

A couple weeks ago, we wrapped up a very successful Cisco Live event in Orlando for more than 20,000 attendees. During the conference, we announced a new name for our software product formerly known as Cisco Virtual Network Management Center (VNMC).

The new name for VNMC is Cisco Prime Network Services Controller – and in the video interview below, I highlighted some of our new innovations with this product.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoEXeE7fa6A

Over the last couple of years, Cisco Prime Network Service Controller (Prime NSC) has developed into Cisco’s primary management platform for Layer 4 through 7 network services deployment in a cloud or virtualized environment. Today the software supports multiple different use cases for network services, with several hundred customers worldwide.

Cisco Prime Network Services Controller is the control point and management software for the InterCloud solution – providing VM workload mobility between a private and public cloud while retaining the same IP address and Layer 2 connectivity. As outlined in a recent blog post by my colleague Gary Kinghorn, our new Nexus 1000V InterCloud solution for hybrid cloud was a big hit at Cisco Live.  During the InterCloud demonstration at Cisco Live, we showed how this Cisco-created technology allows enterprise organizations to extend their Layer 2 network to public clouds like Amazon Web Services.

The screenshots below illustrate how InterCloud enables the secure migration of a VM to a public cloud environment:

At Cisco Live, we also announced our new fabric path technology called Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA). This new Unified Fabric technology enables simplified network automation and provisioning for both physical server and VM deployments. In the DFA architecture, Cisco Prime Network Services Controller is responsible for managing network services insertion – including firewalls and load balancers – when provisioning or moving VMs.

DFA and Cisco Prime Network Services Controller will provide a highly integrated data center fabric with consistent physical and virtual network services – including optimized service traffic forwarding and flexibility in placing network services in the fabric. Prime NSC will dynamically create these network services and communicate with Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager, the central point of management for DFA.  The result is greater agility and operational simplicity for your data center networks.

In a Cisco Live breakout session, I outlined some of the market trends that are influencing how our customers utilize their data center network infrastructure. Some of these trends – including infrastructure-as-a-service, virtualization, and software-defined networking – are changing the operational model for the data center and the way that vendors like Cisco are designing our products.  Cisco Prime Network Services Controller is at the forefront of that change, helping our customers to evolve and adapt to this new model.

To learn more about Cisco Prime Network Services Controller, visit:  www.cisco.com/web/go/services-controller