It was about 18 months ago, when I started a new project called “Catena”. It was based on my inventions in the area of application-chaining, security, segmentation and L4-L7 applications integration.
I also lead/managed the team to design, develop, validate and deliver the product to customers. The Catena project has grown significantly in last few months. Catena has won 4 industry awards. A large number of customers are deploying Catena.
Catena allows the user to create, orchestrate and scale an elastic network. It could be a data center, service provider or enterprise network.
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.
The solution is natively embedded into the switch/router, i.e., the user doesn’t have to buy any service module or external hardware.
Here are some key points:
- Catena doesn’t use any additional packet headers (neither proprietary, nor standards based)
- Catena doesn’t mandate the use of any specialized hardware
- Catena doesn’t mandate the use of any particular controller
Here are some of the links:
- Cisco CEO, Chuck Robbins’ message about Catena
- My Cisco Live presentation on Catena
- Catena blog
- Catena configuration guide on Nexus 9000
- Catena configuration guide on Nexus 7000
For more information and slide deck, please email nxos-catena@cisco.com
Can Catena be deployed within a Cisco EVPN fabric, and if so, when in routed mode can the services be variously distributed across numerous leafs within the fabric, that being can hosts be deployed on different leafs than the services being chained?