Cisco NSO vs DNA Center – What’s the difference?

Last Modified: October 7, 2024

Date: October 7, 2024

Blog featured image for a blog with title - Cisco NSO vs DNA Center

Table of Contents

Introduction

Cisco is one of the leading technology companies that designs and supplies networking and IT solutions to help global business firms and organizations. Among key Cisco solutions for the network management and automation sphere, there are Cisco NSO (Network Services Orchestrator) and Cisco Catalyst Center, which used to be Cisco DNA Center. It is important for anyone who is looking to learn about these two technologies to understand the key difference between Cisco NSO and DNA Center.

In this blog post, we will look into the key features of both these technologies and Cisco NSO vs DNA Center, helping you make an informed decision on which solution best fits your specific requirements. If you are looking to master Cisco NSO, pursuing Cisco NSO Training is an ideal choice. Let us compare Cisco NSO vs DNA Center to understand their differences in detail.

Cisco NSO vs DNA Center

Below, we have explained the difference between Cisco NSO and DNA Center in a tabular form based on different factors.

Factors	Cisco NSO	DNA Center
Scope and Focus	Automating configuration, provisioning, and lifecycle management of network services across diverse environments.	Centralized platform for managing and automating network infrastructure, primarily focusing on Cisco devices.
Abstraction and Modeling	Utilizes YANG data modeling to abstract network devices and services, enabling flexible and reusable configurations.	Leverages device-specific templates and APIs for automation, with limited abstraction capabilities.
Multivendor Support	Supports a wide range of network vendors and protocols through its YANG model library.	Primarily focuses on Cisco devices, with some support for third-party integrations.
Deployment and Integration	Requires significant effort for deployment and integration, often involving custom scripting and development.	Offers pre-built integrations and templates, simplifying deployment and configuration.
Programming Language	Leverages Python for scripting and customization, enabling powerful automation capabilities.	Primarily relies on REST API for interactions and automation, with limited scripting options.
Network Visibility and Monitoring	Heavily focuses on service management, mainly service orchestration and configuration, although it does offer basic monitorization capabilities.	Provides a broad solution suite to help users monitor, visualize, and troubleshoot the networks.
Security	It comprises several security features such as role-based access control and encryption to enhance network security.	It contains authentication and access control but makes use of additional configurations for enhanced security.
Cost and Licensing	Requires significant upfront investment and ongoing licensing costs for its advanced functionality.	Offers a priced licensing plan that can be customized with options of licensing based on the number of devices and functionality.

Now that we have a detailed understanding of Cisco NSO vs DNA center, let us discuss the basics of both technologies.

What is Cisco NSO?

Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), or Cisco NSO, is a network automation platform that offers a number of robust features for service providers and large enterprise environments. NSO excels in managing complex, multi-vendor networks and is particularly well-suited for scenarios involving:

Service orchestration: NSO enables service providers to design, deliver, and manage network services with the necessary flexibility. These include automating services such as provisioning, configuration, and, most importantly, lifecycle management.
Network virtualization: NSO helps in the process of creating, building, and managing VNFs to allow network operators to efficiently deploy and expand the range of services.
Multi-vendor environments: NSO shines in environments where various vendor equipment needs to be managed under a unified platform. It provides a single point of control for configuring, monitoring, and troubleshooting diverse network devices.
Multi-vendor environments: NSO excels where all sorts of vendor equipment, which is required to be centrally managed, is to be deployed. It gives a unified platform to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot various network devices.
Policy-driven automation: NSO enables the development of policies that regulate usage of the network and sorts it in a way that can scale up and down according to the changes within the network or services needed by the end customer. This helps to maintain compliance and make the network configurations more consistent across the network.

Key Use Cases

Here are some key use cases of Cisco NSO:

Simplification of Service configuration across multiple network devices and vendors.
Integration with SDN Controllers and other network automation tools.

Why choose Cisco NSO?

Cisco NSO provides a highly scalable and flexible platform to organizations that operate complex, multi-vendor networks, and need a solution to automate service provisioning and orchestration.

What is DNA Center?

Cisco Catalyst Center, formerly known as Cisco DNA Center, is a network management application that is specially designed for enterprises that want to streamline their network and receive more detailed insights into their infrastructure. It aims to provide a centralized control point for managing all aspects of the network, including:

Network discovery and inventory: Upon deployment, the DNA Center is capable of discovering and cataloguing network devices that are connected to the network and provides essential data about the configurations and connectivity status of connected devices.
Policy-based network management: DNA Center enables administrators to set up network guidelines and policies and enforce them throughout the network. This ensures consistency in configurations, access privilege, and security settings at each instance it is provisioned to.
Network assurance and troubleshooting: DNA Center provides vital network visibility and monitoring resources, allowing the network teams to investigate and solve issues.
Wireless management: The wireless network management solution offered by DNA Center includes access point management, client management on wireless networks, and security.

Note: DNA Center has been mainly marketed to enterprises as it addresses the issues of simplifying networks, maintaining security, and improving the performance of the network. It comes with a user-friendly graphical user interface that can be easily accessible to network administrators with varying skills.

Use cases of DNA Center

Managing Enterprise networks that use Cisco Devices.
DNA Center is used to optimize network performance with the help of AI-based analytics.
Implementing policy-based network segmentation and security.

Why Choose DNA Center?

DNA Center is perfect for organizations that rely heavily on Cisco’s infrastructure and requires a simple and unified approach to network management. It is best for providing visibility, security, and automation in enterprise networks.

Now, we have discussed both Cisco NSO and DNA Center to understand their difference.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What is Cisco DNA Center?

Cisco Catalyst Center (early named as Cisco DNA Center) is a powerful tool to deal with the network, enhance the utilization of Cisco products, and minimize general IT costs.

Q2. What is Cisco NSO used for?

Cisco NSO is software that assists in managing and automating a network in order to make the configuration of a network easy and quick, which directly helps in faster setup of the network.

Q3. What distinguishes the Cisco Catalyst Center from the DNA Center?

There is no difference. The DNA Center has been renamed to the Cisco Catalyst Center.

Q4. What is Cisco DNA called now?

Cisco DNA is now called the Cisco Catalyst™ Center.

Conclusion

Both Cisco NSO and DNA Center are designed specially to meet the demands of the modern complicated networks, but they have different purposes, and their strengths vary. NSO is a solution for managing and automating network services, while DNA Center is the solution for managing and automating network operations.

Cisco NSO is most impressive in its ability to offer a vendor-agnostic model-based solution to operational networking, i.e., network automation, which is valuable for organizations with a large, diverse network. At the same time, Cisco DNA Center is more specific to Cisco’s DNA solution. In this blog, we have clearly discussed Cisco NSO vs DNA Center and also the various features of Cisco NSO and DNA Center.