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Unlocking Arista: Why are Enterprises Adopting Arista in the Data Centre in 2024

George Hewitt

This new blog series 'Unlocking Arista' and the following accompanying blogs aim to dive into Arista's solution for Data Centre (DC) Networking specifically targeting its use cases for large enterprises across different sectors. The series aims to explore Arista's success and what makes their solution something you should consider when refreshing your Data Centre today.

Arista is established by Gartner as one of the Market Leaders and Visionaries in the DC networking space competing head-to-head with the likes of Juniper and Cisco. Arista is the market leader today for 100G/200G/400G Ethernet switching platforms. Additionally, Arista's latest earnings call for Q1 2024 shows a year-over-year increase of 16.3%. That's all very positive, but what makes it so special and what are they doing right!

In this blog, we will highlight at a high level what makes up the Arista DC solution and what's made it so compelling for many enterprises to make the move.

Extensible Operating System (EOS)

EOS is Arista's OS equivalent to Juniper's Junos or Cisco's NX-OS. The major standout highlights of Arista's EOS architecture are as follows:

  • One EOS Image Across Domains (Feature parity and syntax consistent across the DC/LAN/WAN)
  • Highly Programmable: APIs from JSON to SDKs
  • Reliability: Arista is well known for having very few bugs that make it into production code, which is achieved through performing strict back-testing of new code releases against all historical bugs and enabled features
  • Easy to Train Staff to Use: Remarkably similar to another vendor's CLI syntax
  • Strong Fundamental Architecture:
    • State Separation: All processes in their own user space
    • Publish-Subscribe State Sharing
    • Real-Time State Streaming Telemetry Capabilities
    • Unmodified Secure Linux Kernel
    • Highly Programmable API
  • EOS Platform Flexibility:
    • Standard EOS (Hardware)
    • vEOS (Virtual Machine)
    • cEOS (Container)
    • CloudEOS (Cloud Native)

Hardware: Leveraging Merchant Silicon

Arista provides various Switching and Routing orientated platforms we've come to expect in the DC networking space, with modular and fixed variants available up to a staggering 800G for high-performance designs. Arista proudly utilises top-tier merchant silicon, facilitating open standards-based networking that enables a quick time-to-market. Significantly, Arista's adoption of a merchant silicon approach ensures cutting edge platforms are swiftly brought to market, leveraging technological advancements aligned with Moore's Law. In contrast, other vendors choose custom ASICs paired with monolithic software, leading to proprietary platforms and increased costs.

CloudVision: Multi-Function NetOps Platform

CloudVision Portal (CVP) is Arista's single pane of glass for management, better known as the 'GUI,' which manages devices across your estate. To clarify while CVP is optional WhiteSpider highly recommend it due to the ability to leverage a multitude of features encompassing network management and telemetry. The major standout highlights for Arista's CVP architecture are as follows:

  • Support for Multi-Domain: DC/LAN/WAN Device Management
  • Containers: Logically group devices across Large Scale/Multi-Site deployments, aligning configuration standards across different hierarchies
  • Managed Device Telemetry
  • Integrations with Arista Products/3rd Party Tools such as ITSM platforms
  • Automated Deployments:
    • Zero-Touch Provisioning
    • Apply Pre-Prepared Templates
    • Custom Template Workflows (Build out scenarios for Spine-Leaf/EVPN constructs or Day 2 operations such as port modifications)
  • Change Control: A tool perfectly suited for organisations with established change control procedures.
    • Orchestrate Network Wide Changes
    • Upgrades
    • Rollbacks
    • Snapshots
    • Create specific sub-tasks such as routing or key endpoint checks to determine success pre and post change
  • Compliance / Risk:
    • Report on Configuration Changes and Deviations
    • Configuration Archive
    • Vulnerability Assessment
    • Remediation
  • Cognitive Analytics:
    • Correlation Analysis
    • Predictive Algorithms Network-Wide

Summary

With all components in unison Arista offers a compelling solution in the DC for different use cases. Arista Networks support an Ansible collection known as Arista Validated Designs or known simply as 'AVD' for short. The collection includes a set of Ansible roles and modules to automate your network intent. You can utilise the EOS API (direct to the Switch) or via the CVP API. It is simpler and recommended to adopt a DevOps approach with Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines to automate workflows, from building configurations to testing them both before and after deployment
 
In the next blog we will dive into CVP, specifically the power of the Change Control feature. If you're interested in understanding more about Arista through a demo of CloudVision or would like to discuss your own environment requirements and challenges, please get in touch with us.

WhiteSpider specialises in advanced technology services, offering consultancy, strategic advice, and support in enterprise service architectures, helping organisations to standardise their IT infrastructures as they transition to digital, software-defined architectures. With industry leading expertise in the data centre, cloud and enterprise networking, we design, deploy and manage software-defined architectures that simplify and automate IT estates.

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