Cisco NAE – Network Assurance Engine

What is NAE:

Cisco Network Assurance Engine is the critical intent-assurance pillar of Cisco’s vision for intent-based data center networks. Built on Cisco’s patented network-verification technology, Network Assurance Engine is a comprehensive intent-assurance solution that mathematically verifies the entire data center network for correctness. It gives operators the confidence that their network is always operating consistently with their intent, even as it changes dynamically.

With Cisco Network Assurance Engine operators can:

●      Predict the impact of network changes: Proactively verify changes made to the network for correctness to drive increased change agility while significantly reducing the risk of network failures induced by human error.

●      Verify network-wide behavior: Continuously analyze and verify the dynamic state of the network against intent and policy to ensure connectivity and eliminate potential network outages and vulnerabilities before any business impact occurs.

●      Ensure network security policy and compliance: Ensure network security policies and check for compliance against business rules to reduce security risk and achieve provable continuous compliance by policy and state.

Operational benefits:

●      Operator playbook: Smart events that precisely convey the diagnosis, cause, impact, and remediation of complex network issues in a context-specific human-readable manner.

●      Codification of knowledge: Codifies multiple years of Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) and autonomous system cross-customer domain knowledge.

●      DVR audit trail: Complete record of historical configuration, state, and assurance analysis data that is easily retrievable, searchable, sortable, and filterable.

●      Offline analysis: Enable customers to do a remote on-demand analysis of multiple fabrics.

●      Ease of deployment: Seamless deployment using controller credentials with no additional sensors; deep linking with Cisco ACI fabric.

The Cisco Network Assurance Engine achieves all of the above by reading the entire policy—every configuration, the network-wide state, and the operator’s intent—and building from these comprehensive and mathematically accurate models of network behavior. It then combines these models with Cisco’s operational domain knowledge of networking to generate smart events that instantly pinpoint any deviations from intended behavior and suggest expert-level remediation recommendations. By providing this continuous verification and validation of the entire data center network, the Cisco Network Assurance Engine fundamentally transforms the operations paradigm from reactive to proactive

Deployment model:

The Cisco Network Assurance Engine can be deployed as:

●      A software-only virtual form factor that runs on three virtual machines, with specifications depending on the scale of the customer’s fabric.

●      The product is nonintrusive, requiring only fabric credentials without the need to deploy any sensors.

●      Cisco Network Assurance Engine can be deployed with a one click upload and installed on the Cisco Nexus^® Dashboard. Another option is to deploy using the virtual form factor that runs on three virtual machines; this typically takes less than 30 minutes to deploy.

●      An application on the Cisco Nexus Dashboard that can be downloaded from the Cisco DC App Center.