Wonderful, Graphical Management
No network is truly good unless you can easily control it….and there are a number of built-in utilities and great tools that make programming, deploying, troubleshooting, and tuning networks of CX-OS switches easy.
The Network Analytics Engine (NAE) is a set of tools that you just get when you buy a switch. They continually interrogate the switch for operating status and the status of all traffic that’s flowing through it. NAE time-stamps all activity and stores it on the switch; waiting for retrieval and analysis. NAE also provides automatic notification through a lot of Aruba and third-party tools. There’s also a growing library of tools that automate retrieval and analysis of this stored information, using the built-in REST API toolkits that come with NAE. Network managers can also set rules to monitor specific traffic of interest (network security breaches, anyone?), collect and correlate the data, and automatically report it. System health and switch utilization, transceiver health, and OSPF route health are only a few parameters that can be automatically monitored.
NAE is tightly integrated with NetEdit, which is a configuration and management tool that simplifies the programming and troubleshooting of switches. NetEdit allows for programmatic configurations and deployments; reducing configuration errors and reducing work…point-and-click management. Enter the configuration file, and NetEdit goes out, finds the switch, auto- matically programs it, and then does an automatic verification that the configuration changes were correctly applied.
Need a very high-end, inexpensive, cloud-based management system to cover switches (and wireless access points) in the same pane of glass, with world-view drill-downs and AI-based insights to determine root cause problems? Consider Central. Central abstracts network management from the command-line management. A reporting wizard allows for the creation of custom reports.
The Clarity enhancement to Central stores all transaction informa- tion and lets you ‘roll back in time’ to review problems in the past, and it also allows you to review each problem session both from inside the network and also outside of the network on both ends to find the true cause of connection issues.
Central can also profile all devices attaching to the network and categorize them as to the type of device they really are (and can check devices against their stated profile to discover impostors).
The Totally New Switch Architecture
- The Ultra-high capacity, Ultra-high Reliability Core
- Wonderful, Graphical Management
- The Self-Defending Network