Catena: A Disruptive Innovation

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