Arista Networks

The trend towards using cloud architectures and principles in other areas has not stopped at routing. The experiences acquired in the cloud field are changing and influencing the traditional routing landscape. Arista is leveraging its cloud expertise and principles of scale and simplify software-driven networks for routing use cases. Based on its Spine and Leaf architecture, Arista devices can be used for switching and high-performance routing at the same time. The advantage of Arista is that the devices offer high port density, deep buffering and integrated DWDM with MACSec encryption compared to other vendors. The routing use cases range from cloud DCI, peering and interconnect to WAN and many more.

The evolution of the network campus architecture from a three-tier approach (core, aggregation, access) has already taken place in the form of a two-tier Spine and Leaf architecture. In addition, the need for efficient campus operations and the pressure on operations teams is increasing with user demands for a flawless voice and video experience and the complexity of the heterogeneous network infrastructure. Arista's approach to this challenge is its automation capabilities and the single-tier SplineTM architecture combined with cognitive actions and secure segmentation. The benefits of the solution are the reduction of operational costs through Arista’s single image operating system and the consistent implementation of cloud principles, resulting in a seamless end-to-end solution from campus through the data centre to the cloud.

The trend of cyber attacks on businesses is increasing dramatically every day. The complexity and sophistication of attacks is constantly evolving, putting businesses at high risk. Arista's security portfolio provides the necessary protection for assets on-premises and in the cloud with solutions such as the recently acquired AI Network Detection and Response from Awake or through Zero Trust and Zone Segmentation frameworks and others. Furthermore, the portfolio is completed with WiFi intrusion detection and prevention and the integration with Firewall vendors to offload traffic to the switches.

With the acquisition of Awake Security, Arista has added an AI solution for Network Detection and Response (NDR) to its portfolio. The integration of the solution into the campus, data centre, cloud and IoT portfolio provides customers with the ability to support their security team with an autonomous NDR that detects and responds to internal and external network threats and provides triage and incident response services. The solution secures your infrastructure by detecting and prioritising malicious and behavioural threats using artificial intelligence. In a second step, the solution correlates the incidents and collects all relevant data to decide how to respond to the threat. To make these decisions, Awake uses situational awareness by tracking entities (IT, OT or IoT) that may or may not be managed through the network to learn their behaviour and understand their intentions.

The solution was recently launched when elements from the 2020 acquisition of Big Switch Networks and the already established Data Analyser (DANZ) solution were combined to form Arista's DANZ Monitoring Fabric TM (DMF). DMF is the industry's first next-generation network packet broker solution that leverages an SDN-controlled fabric using a merchant silicon switch. It also provides real-time and historical data about your physical, virtual and container environments, meeting the security and visibility requirements of cloud-native data centres. DMF offers Network Packet Broker (NPB) functions such as filtering, aggregation or load balancing, but also advanced functions such as deduplication and packet slicing. The solution can integrate analytics or recording nodes that can perform deep application-level analytics or packet recordings that enable network and application performance issues to be monitored, detected and remediated.

With CloudVision, Arista provides a management plane for automating the entire network from wired and wireless campus to private, public and hybrid cloud. The solution is based on the principles of Arista’s software driven approach, open standards-based design and native programmability. The turnkey solution offers organisations an automation and telemetry solution for their infrastructure. The functionality of CloudVision is wide and covers topics such as real time and historical time series telemetry with the necessary data granularity that provides you and your operations team with monitoring and also forensic troubleshooting capabilities which reduces your mean-time to both detect and repair. Additional functions include automated provisioning and Change Control, Compliance Dashboard, Controller Integration and many more.