CSM Opinions?

[Justin Kurynny]

Hello CSM Veterans,

I'm a Cisco reseller and I have a customer that wants to manage about 20 firewalls which are all ASA 5510 Base. No network modules, no SSM. They want integrated management and they want the ability to upgrade their ASAs concurrently by pushing out an image with just a few clicks (not each ASA individually). They would also like to be able to aggregate tables, graphs and other information into a single view if possible.

Three questions:

1. How well will CSM perform these tasks?

2. Can you a recommend a good brochure/document/video that reviews the ASA management capabilities?

3. CSM doesn't seem to get updated that often (the latest as of today, 4.2, was posted on 9/8/2011). Is it a well-adopted and mature platform? I don't want to sell something that this going to be EoS. What are your thoughts about the viability of CSM over, say, the next 5 years?

Thank you,

Justin

[Marvin Rhoads · Accepted solution]

The use case you present seems tailor-made for CSM's capabilities. The tasks you described are all ably done by CSM.

There's not a good "ASA Management" brochure that I know of. The CSM Product and Support pages are a good start.

If you're a Cisco Partner, there is a very good training presentation the security team did just last month. The Webex is archived. Look for it as "Cisco Security -- "Expert" Level Partner Training Program" in the Partner Community pages.

4.2 is a very current release and 4.x in general represents some significant development and investment resources on Cisco's part. It hasn't been rolled into the whole Cisco Prime scheme (yet) - but I wouldn't be surprised to see that in the future as it still has some of the Cisco "LMS Common Services" underpinnings.

[Justin Kurynny]

Thanks Marvin. Perfect answer--this is exactly the level of detail I was looking for. I'll definitely look for the WebEx.

Justin