Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Sheet

 

Cisco Nexus^® Dashboard transforms data-center network operations with simplicity, automation, and analytics.

Product overview

In this era of digital transformation and business resiliency, continuous innovation is critical for organizations to succeed, and experiencing downtime along the way is not an option. Users increasingly demand more features, better usability, reliability, and environmental sustainability from the applications they use.

The network plays a huge role in meeting such demands, and provisioning reliable data-center networking services as fast as possible, when and where organizations need it, is a must. However, network infrastructure management is becoming more complex, diverse, and distributed, with multiple configuration points, monitoring tools, and vast amounts of data generated every second (Figure 1).

Network complexity in a hyper-diverse and hyper-distributed world

Having an inconsistent way of configuring, provisioning, and operating the network often leads to human errors, potential security holes, and a reactive break-then-fix model that commonly increases downtime due to manual correlation and endless finger-pointing between teams.

Included with every Cisco Nexus 9000 switch tiered licensing purchase, Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides a single focal point to unite the disparate network configurations and views of multiple switches and data centers (Figure 2).

Cisco Nexus Dashboard: powering automation and analytics with a unified, agile, and sustainable networking platform

By providing a single point of management that empowers users to provision and operate their networks across different switches, fabrics, and locations, Cisco Nexus Dashboard is evolving to become one of the simplest ways to provision, monitor, and manage data-center networks.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard unifies multiple services (Figure 3), which enables customers to configure with ease, operate with confidence, and analyze for predictability.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform

With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, you get a unified operations view across all your data center fabrics and the services they consume. It scales out based on the size and number of fabrics and the operational services used to manage them.

The Cisco Nexus Dashboard Admin Console (Figure 4) informs the operator of the health of the various clusters, fabrics, and infrastructure services to quickly detect issues and their root cause, allowing users to toggle between the different Cisco Nexus Dashboard services as needed.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Admin Console

Operational infrastructure standardization and toolchain unification directly lead to operational excellence and savings and free up resources for business innovation.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard services

●     Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights services are being integrated into the Cisco Nexus Dashboard as native services as part of simplifying the overall consumption experience for our customers. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC) consolidates management for multiple NX-OS‒based switches, bringing automation and monitoring for LAN, EVPN VXLAN, and SAN fabrics. Simply choose an operational mode (LAN, SAN), discover new and/or existing switches, and leverage the benefits of Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP), fabric monitoring, backup, faster provisioning and upgrades, and much more. NDFC supports Cisco (including Cisco Nexus, Catalyst^®, and ASR routers) and third-party devices.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller

●     Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator allows operators to easily interconnect fabrics over any routed network, facilitating data-center migrations, as well as network extension across fabrics. Organizations can also centralize network and policy configurations and set up connectivity at scale. Besides rendering configurations defined in the template(s) to the Cisco ACI data center controller, it enables separation of fault domains, and business resiliency at a global scale. Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator also enables end-to-end change-management workflows, centralized fabric management and upgrades, normalized segmentation, and security policies across the data center, SD-WAN, and enterprise branch and campus networks.

●     With Cisco ACI and SDA integrations, common policy is now extended between the data center and the campus branch via SD-WAN. Without SD-WAN, there is a chance of applications experiencing higher latency in the unmanaged connection as the underlay is not coupled tightly with the data center orchestration solution. The Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator and SD-WAN integration provides application-aware, SLA-based routing in Cisco SD-WAN, which is used for interconnecting data center sites. For example, the SD-WAN integration provides application-aware SLA-based routing (policy-based path selection and QoS treatment) in the SD-WAN infrastructure used for interconnecting fabrics.

●     5G transformations are challenging telecom providers to develop data-center networks of the future that can seamlessly scale, automate, and integrate their infrastructure from the central data center to the edge and across the transport network. This requires the adoption of an end-to-end programmable SDN-enabled approach across data center applications and the service provider’s transport backbone. Orchestrator provides:

◦    Automation of SR-MPLS policies that can be centrally orchestrated across the 5G telco data center sites (central, regional, and edge data centers)

◦    Consistent SR-MPLS handoff transport and application slice interworking between 5G telco data center sites and the service provider’s transport backbone

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator automates fabric interconnect sand centralizes network configurations across Cisco ACI

●     Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator automates fabric interconnect sand centralizes network configurations across Cisco ACI, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights allows operators to minimize downtime by turning hardware and software telemetry into insights (including anomalies and advisories) to identify potential issues and recommendations to fix them, gathering years of experience under a single network-operations platform. It can also take advantage of its analytics to learn more about sustainability, compliance, changes, and traffic behavior (including flow records, drop, congestion, latency, AI/ML RoCEv2, and more). It also minimizes risk by providing pre- and post-upgrade assistance and can enhance visibility by integrating tools from vendors such as VMware, Splunk, ServiceNow, Panduit, and many more. It incorporates a set of advanced alerting, baselining, correlation, and forecasting algorithms to provide a deep understanding into the behavior of the network. The Insights service and AppDynamics^® are tightly integrated to pinpoint exactly where and when an application issue originated from a network perspective.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights monitors network health across Cisco ACI and Cisco NX-OS‒based networks

●     Third-party applications: Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers an open API model with a rich suite of services for third-party developers to build applications. REST APIs allow third-party tools to authenticate and integrate with key services such as Nexus Dashboard Insights and Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator. Currently supported third-party integrations in the Nexus Dashboard ecosystem include ServiceNow ITSM/ITOM, Splunk SIEM, HashiCorp Terraform, and Red Hat Ansible.

Features and benefits

Table 1.           Features and benefits

Prominent features

Seamless operator experience powered by Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Too often the network operations team spends most of its time gathering troubleshooting data to triage and find the root cause an issue. The burden of tying together siloed insights from a fragmented operational toolkit often lies with the operations team. As the company’s data-center footprint extends from the data center across multiple fabrics, and as modern application architectures become the de-facto standard, the operations team needs a unified operations toolchain with a seamless user experience to maintain and operate such complex environments.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard unifies these disparate toolsets and experiences for the operations teams to consume the rich and powerful capabilities of day-2 operations solutions and executes multi-fabric policies from a single pane of glass. Unnecessary handoffs between toolchains and dealing with multiple portals and credentials to get to troubleshooting data and insights have become a thing of the past. Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers a powerful and rich set of capabilities, such as:

●     Single Sign-On (SSO): SSO powers the frictionless interaction between one or multiple Cisco Nexus Dashboard clusters and their native services. The operator logs in once and is able to switch seamlessly between services and Cisco APIC.

●     Unified operations platform: The Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform is a powerful unified platform capable of scaling out horizontally to accommodate application needs. With a modern microservices infrastructure services stack on a clustered architecture, the same underlying platform can be used to cohost configuration automation capabilities (through Controller and/or Orchestrator) and telemetry/analytics (through Insights), reducing the burden of underlying software and hardware lifecycle maintenance.

●     Sustainability: Cisco Nexus Dashboard with Insights provides detailed reports on power consumption, energy sources, and emission rates for your fabrics based on location. Additional integrations with leading power-management vendors such as Panduit deliver new sustainability insights to enable our customers to gain real-time and historical insights into the power consumption of the IT equipment in their data center and estimate the energy footprint of their operations.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights’ Sustainability Report provides a persona-based dashboard giving RBAC-based access to the different services and sections within the Nexus Dashboard platform

●     Common infrastructure services: Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides a host of common infrastructure services, such as unified installation and upgrade, authentication domains, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), notification services, and API services.

●     Flexible deployment options: Cisco Nexus Dashboard portfolio comprises physical, virtual, and cloud form factors, giving customers unprecedented flexibility while deploying their operations infrastructure and at the same time ensuring a common and unified operator experience through a single pane of glass.

●     Programmable infrastructure: Third-party automation tools are critical to improving reporting workflows and responding to issues encountered by distributed workloads. Cisco Nexus Dashboard has integrations with many third-party services such as ServiceNow, one of the most prevalent IT service management platforms. With the ServiceNow integrations, NetOps and DevOps teams can open and track tickets from within Nexus Dashboard. From one portal, operations teams get visibility into the status of open tickets, resulting in the automation of troubleshooting for faster resolutions across fabrics.

●     SR-MPLS with Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator: With Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, SR-MPLS policies can be centrally automated across 5G telco data center fabrics (central, regional, and edge data centers). Cisco Nexus Dashboard with Insights and Orchestrator services is the most comprehensive way to automate distributed data centers―overcoming the challenges of managing the infrastructure, applications, and data sources distributed over disparate locations.

With these services integrated in Cisco Nexus Dashboard, NetOps teams can achieve command and control over global network fabrics, optimizing performance and attaining insights into data-center network operations.

Platform support

For detailed platform and compatibility support, refer to: https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/Website/datacenter/day2ops/index.html.

Table 2.           Platform support

For exact application versions and services co-hosting requirements, please refer to the compatibility matrix.

Licensing

Cisco Nexus Dashboard software does not require an additional license and it is included with all Cisco Nexus 9000 switch tiered-license purchases. Service and feature access is based on the purchased licensing tier. Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller is offered as part of Cisco Data Center Networking (DCN) Essentials. Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator is offered as part of DCN Advantage. Select Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights features are available in DCN Essentials and DCN Advantage licensing tiers. Previously only DCN Premier customers could access Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights features. This change allows all Cisco Nexus customers to access select Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights features and realize additional use cases and value for each tier.

Tuning the Data Center Networking (DCN) licensing tiers

For a guide to Cisco Nexus Dashboard ordering, please refer to the ordering guide.

Licensing: There are no additional licensing requirements for Cisco Nexus Dashboard. For a guide to ordering, please refer to the ordering guide.

Product specifications

Please refer to the sizing guide for physical and virtual cluster size guidelines.

Table 3.           ND-CLUSTER-L4 (based on Cisco UCS M6 Server) ‒ Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform cluster hardware specifications

Table 4.           Virtual form factor requirements

Table 5.           Amazon AWS cloud form factor requirements per node of Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Table 6.           Microsoft Azure cloud form factor requirements per node of Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Table 7.           Supported site types and integrations on Cisco Nexus Dashboard

For exact application versions and services co-hosting requirements, please refer to the compatibility matrix.

Table 8.           Ordering information

Table 9.           Cisco Nexus Dashboard third-party ecosystem

Warranty information

Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform clusters have a 90-day limited liability warranty.

Cisco environmental sustainability

Information about Cisco’s environmental sustainability policies and initiatives for our products, solutions, operations, and extended operations or supply chain is provided in the “Environment sustainability” section of Cisco’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report.

Reference links to information about key environmental sustainability topics (mentioned in the “Environment sustainability” section of the CSR Report) are provided in the following table:

Table 10.       Cisco Nexus Dashboard environmental sustainability

Reference links to product-specific environmental sustainability information that is mentioned in relevant sections of this data sheet are provided in Table 11.

^*Not available for all Nexus Dashboard/Nexus Dashboard Insights versions

Table 11.       Cisco Nexus Dashboard environmental sustainability

Cisco makes the packaging data available for informational purposes only. It may not reflect the most current legal developments, and Cisco does not represent, warrant, or guarantee that it is complete, accurate, or up to date. This information is subject to change without notice.

Learn more

Power your digital operations transformation with Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Are your operations teams tasked with delivering security, uptime, and business continuity on a complex data center infrastructure? Do they have the right tools that provide proactive change management and precise troubleshooting information tied together in a unified, easy-to-consume user experience? Start powering the transformation of the networking operations teams by standardizing on the Cisco Nexus Dashboard experience. Meet and exceed critical business mandates of agility and availability as you operate your secure, intent-based data center from Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

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Support

As applicable, Cisco will provide support for the product as described here: https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/doing_business/docs/cisco-software-support-service.pdf.

Document history

Table 12.       Document history