Cisco DNA Software for SD-WAN and Routing: Picking a tier

Cisco DNA Software for
SD-WAN and Routing: Picking
a tier

Cisco DNA Software for SD-WAN and Routing is available in three tiers:

Cisco DNA Software for SD-WAN and Routing: Picking a tier

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Cisco DNA Software for SD-WAN and Routing is available
in three tiers:

Let’s dive into the use cases that can be solved within each tier so you can determine what’s right for you. Keep in mind that the application of the use cases by tier has changed recently due to improvements made in the feature functionality.

Cisco DNA Essentials

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Cisco DNA Essentials includes features that enable your entry into software-defined WAN (SD-WAN). For instance, Cisco DNA Essentials enables flexible network topology including hub-and-spoke and both full- and partial-mesh architectures running over IPv4 or IPv6 (VPNs are limited to four user VPNs plus one management VPN). Enable redundancy with DSL, 4G LTE, and multilink router interfaces. Run static or dynamic routing across your network with basic path optimization. Bring up new branches and new locations with zero-touch provisioning and onboarding. And manage it all using Cisco vManage via the cloud or on-premises.

But part of what sets Cisco DNA Essentials apart is the inclusion of cloud security and cloud application functionality in our entry-level offer.

Your network is only as good as it is secure. Cisco DNA Essentials for SD-WAN and Routing offers a multilayered cloud security solution consisting of an enterprise firewall with a Talos® powered intrusion protection system and Cisco Secure Endpoint, including TLS/SSL proxy support, URL filtering, and Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) support, plus Cisco Umbrella® DNS monitoring (visibility only).

Beyond simply being able to route based on applications and service-level agreements (SLAs), Cisco DNA Essentials includes Cloud OnRamp for Multicloud (Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Azure, etc.) and Cloud OnRamp for Software as a Service (for all applications, including Microsoft 365, Webex, Salesforce, Workday, Box, DocuSign, etc.), plus cloud monitoring capabilities via vManage.

Cisco DNA Essentials for SD-WAN and Routing provides all the above and more, to help ensure the best SD-WAN, cloud, and SaaS experience for your users at a reasonable price point.

Cisco DNA Advantage

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Cisco DNA Advantage is the next-level tier that includes our latest innovative features. All the features mentioned in the Cisco DNA Essentials section—SD-WAN, cloud, and SaaS features—are included in Cisco DNA Advantage, plus we raise the bar even further.

First of all, Cisco DNA Advantage includes vAnalytics, our powerful cloud-based service that offers insights into the performance of applications and the underlying SD-WAN network infrastructure. Use multilayer insights into application behavior, application quality of experience (QoE), bandwidth usage, and distribution across sites, devices, tunnels, and carrier links to review the usage of various applications over time in a given infrastructure, assess end-user experience with these applications, and correlate end-user experience with the underlying network performance. And since Cisco vAnalytics collects and stores metadata about traffic flows in its cloud storage for a maximum of one year, you can go back in time to generate analytics based on the historical data.

Second, Cisco DNA Advantage improves security with Cisco’s cloud-based or on-premises SD-WAN Application Intelligence Engine (a deep packet inspection engine), augments Cloud OnRamp with telemetry capabilities to help fine-tune best path calculations on Office 365 installations, uplevels vManage to provide advanced monitoring capabilities for multicloud and SaaS, and provides Amazon Web Services GovCloud, Azure vWAN integration, Azure GovCloud, and Catalyst 8000v upgrade/downgrade support.

Third, Cisco DNA Advantage includes Integrated Border for Campus. Whether in the WAN or in the LAN, in the campus
or in the branch, you can be sure of a unified policy and security implementation for every user, regardless of where they connect.

And lastly, Cisco DNA Advantage for SD-WAN and Routing lifts all VPN restrictions.

Cisco DNA Premier

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Cisco DNA Premier is just like it sounds: the option for those who demand only the finest from their SD-WAN. It has all the features mentioned in the Cisco DNA Essentials section—SD-WAN, cloud, and SaaS features—plus all the features mentioned in the Cisco DNA Advantage section—vAnalytics, full-telemetry Cloud OnRamp, and Integrated Border for Campus—plus we raise the bar as high as it can go.

Cisco DNA Premier includes Cisco Umbrella SIG Essentials licenses. SD-WAN and Umbrella are core elements of Cisco’s secure access service edge (SASE) architecture that consolidates networking and security functions. With Cisco DNA Premier, you can simply and rapidly deploy Umbrella across your network and gain powerful cloud-delivered security to protect against threats on the internet and secure cloud access. This market-leading automation makes it easy to deploy and manage the security environment over tens, hundreds, or even thousands or remote sites. Umbrella offers flexibility to create security policies based on the level of protection and visibility you need—all in the Umbrella dashboard. Here are the Umbrella elements included with a Cisco DNA Premier subscription:

Cloud-delivered DNS-layer security to block requests before a connection is even established
A full-proxy secure web gateway to log and inspect all web traffic
A cloud access security broker (CASB) plus App Discovery functionality to uncover rogue apps
A cloud-delivered firewall to prevent intrusions
Globally sourced internet activity threat intelligence to uncover malicious domains, IPs, and URLs
Cisco Secure Malware Analytics to detect and quarantine malicious files

The combination of Cisco DNA Premier for SD-WAN and Routing and these six items in Cisco Umbrella SIG Essentials effectively covers all five of Gartner’s use cases for SASE deployments.

For a full list of features in Cisco DNA Software for SD-WAN and Routing, please see the SD-WAN and Routing Feature Matrix.

Cisco DNA Software for
SD-WAN and Routing: Selecting Bandwidth

Cisco DNA Software for SD-WAN and Routing:
Selecting Bandwidth

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One of the added wrinkles in SD-WAN and Routing not present in Switching and Wireless, is the need to select a bandwidth tier along with a software tier. Cisco is simplifying licensing and addressing the customer confusion in the market regarding bandwidth consumption in traditional routing and SD-WAN deployments. Rather than offer a dozen or more discrete bandwidth levels, we’ve reduced the number of bandwidth choices to four generously sized bandwidth tiers:

So let’s take a quick look at how bandwidth is determined in SD-WAN and Routing by working through this example.

Bandwidth metering
Cisco DNA Subscriptions

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Add all of your bandwidth usage together. Upstream. Downstream. Across all circuits. That total, that’s your aggregate bandwidth. In this example, it’s 335 Mbps. Now divide that by two to get to your nominal bandwidth level.

Nominal bandwidth is what Cisco’s Product ID (PID) is based on. In this case, you need a PID that can handle greater than 167.5 Mbps. That’s the 200 Mbps Bandwidth Tier. But if you look at the sum of your downstream bandwidth (250 Mbps), you’ll see that it alone is over 200 Mbps. And because of that, you might think that the Tier 1 bandwidth license is insufficient. Don’t worry, it is. The 200 Mbps in Tier 1 enables 400 Mb/s of aggregate bandwidth, which can be used in any upload download ratio.

The key thing to remember in bandwidth selection is that aggregate bandwidth is double the nominal bandwidth. And Cisco permits aggregate bandwidth to be used in any upload/download ratio.

Software support for SD-WAN and routing

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With your Cisco DNA software subscription, you will receive embedded Cisco SWSS, which covers 24x7x365 Cisco TAC support, software release updates, advanced support analytics, and designated service management. This support is valid only for the Cisco DNA software subscription stacks (Cisco DNA Essentials, Advantage, and Premier). Allowing a Cisco DNA subscription to SD-WAN and Routing to lapse eliminates entitlement for calling technical support for Cisco DNA software features.

SD-WAN and routing device OS updates are not entitled via the Cisco DNA subscription and are available only via a service contract on the hardware. For full hardware support, including the network stack (Network Essentials and Advantage), you will require Smart Net Total Care for 24x7x365 Cisco TAC support, proactive security and product alerts, and product lifecycle management. An additional option for hardware support is Solution Support for your multivendor Cisco solution environment. Without an active service contract, you will not have access to technical support for the hardware or the hardware’s operating system.