Use cases for DNAC and NSO

[Chris Heizer]

I am supporting a very large Gov customer with hundreds of locations.  Their network has a combination of legacy Cisco and Brocade network devices as well as the newer Catalyst 8000 and 9000 series routers and switches.  Upgrading the entire environment to Cat 8K and 9K is slow going due to funding, so we are forced to maintain both legacy non-api capable devices as well as the newer generation of devices that do support APIs.  We are developing a CI/CD pipeline in our lab, which uses NSO to translate command line to Openconfig.  In the Production environment, we had already started down the path of implementing DNAC to manage the LAN environment and vSmart/vBond/vManage for SD-WAN.  Our customer is concerned about the overlap between DNAC and NSO.  Is there a business case for both or would one be more beneficial over the other?  I can see where NSO could be sunsetted once all network devices are API capable, but what capabilities would we lose?

[ashasin]

Hi,

At a very simplistic level, DNAC is our offering to enterprises while NSO is an SP offering. Of course there are cases where DNAC is used by SPs as well as enterprises using NSO. 
There is no business use case as such for both combined, however the main area of overlap at the moment is for Enterprise NFV, where both offer solutions for spinning up VNFs on NFVIS based platforms, e.g. ENCS.
DNAC supports a large number of APIs and highly packaged effective automation use cases as well as analytics.
NSO also delivers a toolbox for large scale automation. It is hard to give a generic answer as there is no integration between the two but given your network devices and SDWAN infrastructure, DNAC would be more beneficial.

If you find my reply solved your question or issue, kindly click the 'Accept as Solution' button and vote it as helpful.

You can also learn more about Cisco DNA Center through our live Ask the Experts (ATXs) session. Check out Cisco DNA Center ATXs Resources [https://community.cisco.com/t5/networking-knowledge-base/cisco-dna-center-ask-the-experts-resources/ta-p/4394489] to view the latest schedule for upcoming sessions, as well as the useful references, e.g. online guides, FAQs.