SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) today announced a new network architecture designed to address transitional changes as the enterprise moves to an IoT (Internet of Things)-ready campus. Leveraging EOS® and CloudVision®, Arista’s Cognitive Cloud Networking approach brings operational consistency and modern cloud principles to the enterprise campus. This solution, driven with key partnerships, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, and VMware, helps reduce customer operational expenses through simplified architectures, data-driven analytics and segment-based security.
“Arista is unshackling the complexity of today's legacy multi-tiered box approach to an elegant Spline-based campus design. Once again, we are disrupting the status quo to deliver a cognitive architecture with behavior-driven actions,” said Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO for Arista Networks.
Extending the Cloud Network to Campus
Today’s campus networks suffer from too much complexity brought on by the myriad of platforms, operating systems, proprietary features and network management tools from incumbent vendors. Coupled with the explosive growth of endpoints as well as the requirement for workloads, users and devices to be connected anywhere, the operational costs of managing these complexities become prohibitive.
These challenges are not unlike those of legacy datacenters, before the shift to cloud networking. The cloud networking principles of simplification, open-standards, software-driven control, born in the datacenter, are just as applicable to today’s campus networks.
Arista’s Universal Cloud Network (UCN) delivers common cloud principles for simplified networking topologies and architectures across use-cases. As siloed Places-In-the-Network (PINs) of the legacy enterprise are normalized to become standardized Places-In-the-Cloud (PICs), Arista’s UCN provides a consistent experience and simplifies the model for enterprise customers to extend their datacenter networking practices to the campus networks.
Introducing the Arista 7300X3 and 7050X3 Campus Spline
As the first step in addressing the campus network architecture, Arista is introducing the 7300X3 and 7050X3 Spline, high performance 10/25/40/50/100G Ethernet platforms, extending the open UCN architecture from the datacenter to the campus. As Spline platforms, the X3 Series collapse multiple tiers of legacy hierarchical campus designs into a single tier. Arista Spline customers have realized simplified network designs with fewer touchpoints while still achieving high availability levels for campus voice and video. Proven in the datacenter, the Spline platforms provide a consistent set of switching and routing features including a cognitive approach to automation, segmentation and visibility.
Helping customers diagnose congestion related network performance issues, Flow Tracer, the latest feature in Arista’s telemetry portfolio, provides end-to-end visibility for any flow. The 7300X3 modular Spline system scales to 50 Tbps of performance with a choice of linecard options. The 7050X3 fixed Spline complements the 7300X3, offering a choice of compact and flexible options including 25G and 100G that deliver the same campus network consistency.
A Cornerstone: The Cognitive Management Plane
The data networking industry has seen tremendous growth in the last 40 years, aligned around a set of mature, multi-vendor data plane and control plane options. However, the management plane remains in stark contrast with no consistent or common approach. This leaves the burden to the customer, who is challenged with stitching together vendor-specific management solutions.
The Cognitive Management Plane (CMP) is open framework designed to address this gap for large data sets. The CMP combines a state repository, a stream computation engine, and various application components built into a horizontally scalable cluster. Each cluster manages a subset of network devices from different vendors and interacts with other clusters through vendor-neutral APIs and standardized models, such as OpenConfig with gRPC.
Modern streaming collects the network state to provide full network state history, where machine learning techniques are applied, providing insights including anomalous behavior detection. The goal of the CMP approach makes modern, multi-vendor network management a reality, filling the void in existing management solutions.
Securing the Campus with Cognitive CloudVision
CMP-based turbines can detect network issues that legacy systems have routinely missed and ultimately help to reduce the mean time to identify and remediate these issues. CloudVision federates the state across network types (datacenter, cloud, campus, etc.) and can then share this data with peers in the CMP framework. CloudVision can also display the data to the CloudVision front-end, visualizing both real-time and historical telemetry data with perspectives ranging from high level topology-wide views down to device level details. CloudVision couples this new level of visibility with automated provisioning, giving customers the ability to detect and take action for ongoing operational tasks.
Further, CloudVision provides compliance audit checks, with native alerting for operational situations ranging from deviations in the intended network configuration to the rollout of a security patch. Finally, Macro-Segmentation Services (MSS) leverages an open-standard approach to service insertion for the datacenter or the campus with direct firewall integration from Arista's security partners.
Now campus operators are able to leverage these operational and security tools across cognitive use-cases.
Availability
The Arista 7300X3 and 7050X3 Spline platforms and the associated cognitive EOS and CloudVision capabilities are in trials now with general availability in Q3’18.
Industry Support
"We are redefining the intelligent edge for mobile and IoT while partnering with Arista in next-generation cloud networking for data centers,” said Keerti Melkote, President and Founder of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “We welcome Arista's expansion to the campus Spline and look forward to offering joint best-of-breed solutions for our customers. Our ongoing partnership with Arista is proof that an open multi-vendor approach can not only work but is far better than the proprietary lock-in solutions that plague the industry today."
“Digital transformation is creating a new level of networking and security complexity as organizations move from centralized data centers, to hyper distributed applications and centers of data at the edge,” Greg Bollella, CTO, IoT, VMware. “The proliferation of IoT devices, IoT edge infrastructure, and the growth of cloud computing drives new requirements for managing, monitoring, and securing the enterprise network and edge infrastructure. VMware and Arista share a common vision for creating a digital business fabric for connecting, visualizing, and securely managing IoT endpoints, IoT edge systems, and campus and cloud networks. The combination of Arista’s CloudVision and VMware Pulse IoT Center will go a long way towards realizing this vision.”
About Arista Networks
Arista Networks pioneered software-driven, cognitive cloud networking for large-scale datacenter and campus environments. Arista’s award-winning platforms redefine and deliver availability, agility, automation, analytics and security. Arista has shipped more than fifteen million cloud networking ports worldwide with CloudVision and EOS, an advanced network operating system. Committed to open standards across private, public and hybrid cloud solutions, Arista products are supported worldwide directly and through partners.
ARISTA, EOS, CloudVision, FlexRoute and AlgoMatch are among the registered and unregistered trademarks of Arista Networks, Inc. in jurisdictions around the world. Other company names or product names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Additional information and resources can be found at www.arista.com.
This press release contains forward-looking statements including, but not limited to, statements regarding the benefits of Arista's Universal Cloud Network, Arista’s 7300X3 and 7050X3 campus Spline products, Arista’s EOS and CloudVision software and Arista’s Cognitive Management Plane as well as the enablement of cost savings, increased performance and greater efficiency resulting from the deployment of these products and services. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements including: our limited operating history and experience with developing and releasing new products; product, support or service quality problems; rapidly evolving changes in technology, customer requirements and industry standards as well as other risks stated in our filings with the SEC available on Arista's website at www.arista.com and the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Arista disclaims any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.
