About the Catena Solution

Catena provides hardware (TCAM) based application chaining solution for Cisco Nexus devices so that packets can be redirected through multiple physical or virtual devices without changing the topology or the existing configuration. The solution works with all L4-L7 virtual and physical devices, such as firewalls, IPS, IDS, DoS Protection, WAAS, SSL offload engines, networking monitoring devices, switches, virtual appliances, and containers.

Overview

This chapter provides an overview of the Catena Solution and contains the following sections:

Benefits of Catena

Catena offers a range of features for chaining devices without affecting the existing topology or configuration. Catena provides you the following benefits:

  • Segmentation of traffic.

  • CAPEX savings.

  • OPEX savings: without catena, you need to perform VLAN stitching or create a default gateway, which is hard to deploy and hard to add or remove devices.

  • Provides Telemetry and analytics.

  • Without catena, either all traffic is in a chain or not in a chain. Catena allows secure traffic partitioning through multiple chains. Without catena, you cannot create multiple chains using the same network elements.

  • Catena is also a platform, for which users can write applications.

Licensing Requirements for Catena

Product

License Requirement

Cisco NX-OS

Catena requires a Network Services license. For a complete explanation of the Cisco NX-OS licensing scheme and how to obtain and apply licenses, see the Cisco NX-OS Licensing Guide.

Guidelines and Limitations for Catena

Catena has the following guidelines and limitations:

  • Catena is supported for the Cisco Nexus 9200, 9300, and 9300-EX Series switches.

  • Catena is supported for the Cisco Nexus 9200, 9300, 9300-EX, 9300-FX2, and 9372-PX Series switches.

    Note

    We recommend that you allocate sufficient TCAM space to PACL,VACL, RACL, UDF for Catena Transparent Mode (PACL,VACL), Catena Routed Mode, and UDF Filter respectively.

  • When configuring a catena instance in routed mode, you must enable PBR and IP SLA features.

  • Does not support IPv6 probes in catena chains.

  • Catena configurations may be added and modified when the instance is up and running.

  • Ensure that you have installed the network services license.