DNA Center Review
November 03, 2023
DNA Center Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Center
So the university is continuing growth in terms of the network. We're adopting more and more edge networks and we got to the point where we can't keep deploying people to change the configuration of network devices. We need to be smarter. So DNA center allows us to automate the deployment of network devices. So we can take a device out of a box, ship it to the location, not even touch it, and plug into the network and it's going to be provisioned automatically. That saves us hours of work. So that was probably the most attractive feature of the product. There are tons of other features that we really like. Automation, we are not heavily using it right now, but we are early into this product's lifecycle. But we hope to use it heavily, we hope to rely heavily on automation, so we would need to change the configuration of any single device manually. We would hope that with system recognizes, oh, this is a Professor X, so they need a particular security profile applied automatically or this is an ACTV camera, so we need to go to the secure network. We hope to adopt this kind of work very soon.
- I think it abstracts the technical detail of what actually needs to be configured on the devices. So you can specify the intent and it'll do complex technical commands on the devices. You do not necessarily need to know I'm from a technical background, so I do know that, but on a scale, it's very easy just to click a few buttons and say what you want and it'll just do it for you.
- We started using the product quite early and as I understand it was quite a new product for Cisco, so it's been developed quite aggressively. So even though we thought we were running the latest recommended version, a month later we realized that we are so much behind that it might take a week to upgrade to the latest recommended versions. In a way, it's good because it's developed so fast, but it's hard to keep up with all the implementations. And last upgrade for us took three weeks because we were so behind and it just takes longer because we've got large-scale deployment.
- Well, it's hard to justify because the University is not a profit organization and people usually ask us for dollar value, but we don't have one. As long as their reputation is good, the students are happy, and the experience on the campus from a student and academics are good - I think that's a success for us.
We haven't used anything like this. We looked at the competitors. I think we are quite early in their products, so I think now Cisco DNA center is quite mature, still in heavy development, but compared to the competitors, we think that there is nothing like it out there.
Do you think Cisco Catalyst Center delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with Cisco Catalyst Center's feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco Catalyst Center live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst Center go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Cisco Catalyst Center again?
Yes