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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.
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.
For a complete explanation of Cisco NX-OS licensing recommendations and how to obtain and apply licenses, see the Cisco NX-OS Licensing Guide.
Catena has the following guidelines and limitations:
Catena is supported for the Cisco Nexus 9200, 9300, and 9300-EX 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.
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