Catena selected as finalist in Leading Lights awards

Recently Lightreading announced the finalists for the prestigious leading lights awards.

One of the most coveted categories of these awards is Most Innovative Telecoms Product or Service (Fixed/Carrier Ethernet/Optical).

Catena has been selected as finalist in this category.

Organizers mention that there were 294 entries competing for these awards.

Catena is a multi-terabit service chaining, security, segmentation, analytics and L4-L7 applications integration solution.

The innovative solution works with all L4-L7 virtual and physical devices, such as, Firewalls, IPS, IDS, WAAS, DDoS protection, load-balancers, SSL offload engines, network monitoring, etc.

With our patent pending algorithms, Catena allows user to determine the path of various types of traffic. User can configure security policies to configure which traffic goes through which elements in the network. An element, could be a cluster of devices, in which case Catena load-balances to the cluster. Catena performs health monitoring and failure handling of devices.

The solution is natively embedded into the switch/router, i.e., the user doesn’t have to buy any service module or external hardware.

Currently, Cisco Nexus series of switches natively has Catena.

Here are some key points:

There is no solution today which can do all of these: security, service chaining, load-balancing, analytics, L4-L7 integration, orchestration.

Catena doesn’t use any additional packet headers (neither proprietary, nor standards based)

Catena doesn’t mandate the use of any particular hardware

Catena doesn’t mandate the use of any particular controller

Catena allows the user to create, orchestrate and scale an elastic network. It could be a data center, service provider or enterprise network.

A number of customers are deploying Catena.

Here are some of the links:

Catena blog

Catena configuration guide

Catena command reference guide

NetworkWorld lists Catena as Product of the Week.

For more information and slide deck, please email nxos-catena@cisco.com