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Cisco DNA means goodbye to CLI?

This week, bloggers look at Cisco's shift from CLI, Savvius' packet capture appliance and cybersecurity as a vertical industry.

Eamon McCarthy Earls
By
Published: 28 Jul 2016

Shamus McGillicuddy, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo., believes that Cisco's Digital Network Architecture (DNA) is different than predecessor "marchitectures," especially after reviewing the Cisco DNA strategy at this year's Cisco Live. Cisco DNA aims to shift away from command line interface (CLI) -- even though thousands of network engineers have gained mastery of CLI to program Cisco devices.

McGillicuddy said that many veteran engineers will be "extremely dubious" of a move away from CLI, as it devalues their preexisting skills and because an effective replacement seems unlikely to some. Nevertheless, McGillicuddy believes that with Cisco DNA, change is on the way. Cisco executives want more engineers to program, and are offering open APIs for APIC-EM and ACI to allow for automation.

Explore McGillicuddy's assessment of Cisco's shift away from CLI.

Savvius moves up in packet capture race

Blogger Drew Conry-Murray, writing in Packet Pushers, took a look at Savvius' newly updated packet capture appliance. The updated packet capture appliance, Insight 2.0, is billed as a low-cost option that also includes network monitoring capabilities. The packet capture appliance sits inline at remote or branch offices, small networks or retail locations and analyzes bandwidth utilization, flow types and packet volumes as well as application response times.

According to Conry-Murray, the packet capture appliance offers 100 Mbps throughput with three Gigabit Ethernet ports and a 128 gigabyte SSD storage drive. The drive can capture packets for deeper analysis, but slowly overwrites old data unless a larger drive is installed. Together, the appliance costs $1,500. Conry-Murray adds that the system comes pre-loaded with dashboards, with options for customers to create their own dashboards and even aggregate data from multiple appliances.

Get more insight about Conry-Murray's review of the Savvius appliance.   

Should cybersecurity be more vertical?

Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass., believes that cybersecurity has always been a horizontal technology that's broadly similar across all industries. Most groups need IDS/IPS, firewalls, threat management gateways and antivirus. He believes that a number of factors, such as growing business focus on cybersecurity; CISO progression; more regulations and industry-focused threats, are driving greater vertical integration.

Oltsik projects vertical cybersecurity industry integration, beginning with IBM and others such as Cisco, which is ramping up services. He believes that other horizontal technology vendors will need to follow suit, teaming up with GE Healthcare, Boeing, Siemens or Honeywell.

Take a look at Oltsik's ideas about cybersecurity.

Next Steps

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