Cisco has launched a software-driven architecture for managing branch and WAN operations, called the Digital Network Architecture (DNA), that has some networking pros hailing the new technology and others are taking a wait-and-see approach.
In a blog post, Rob Soderbery, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager for the Enterprise Networking Group, said the architecture and solutions were just the first in a wave to come for intelligent WAN (IWAN) and network operations teams.
DNA grew out of all the talk about Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), which decouple the software and management from the underlying hardware, a direction competitors such as Arista and Juniper are taking as well. Prashanth Shenoy, Cisco’s senior director of enterprise networks, calls it a “monumental shift†in direction for the company and says it will require changes among its enterprise customers as well. He pointed to three ways in which the network needs to change:
