Looking Glass of Cloud Networking

Since the 2000 era, the network has changed dramatically, becoming more and more mission-critical. There are so many drivers powering today’s digital network transformation. Think about the Internet of Things or the cloud native applications or OT, operational technology. All of these are connected via cognitive cloud networking with its agile software stack, programmability and a leaf-spine network for all traffic types. This cloud network, pioneered by Arista is hungry for more innovation when it comes to secure visibility. It is a hard problem after all—network data is orders of magnitude more voluminous then typical data sources of ingestion.

The Next Generation of Cognitive Campus Workspaces

Campus networks are undergoing another massive transition in the COVID teleworking era. With this fundamental shift and as administrators consider an interconnected IoT (Internet of Things) environment, the boundary between the office, home, teleworker and user is converging. Security concerns with ever-increasing threat vectors are substantiated. How does one secure an IoT environment and guard against malware and outbreaks? How is the network impacted as some workloads shift to the cloud? Why do we cope with wired and wireless silos? The challenge lies in successfully transitioning the existing siloed campus into an integral data-driven model for clients, users and devices from IoT to cloud with a common experience, while addressing security and availability needs with lower operational costs. These are the key requirements of the third-generation campus evolution as shown in the figure below.

The Next Generation of Cognitive Campus Workspaces

Campus networks are undergoing another massive transition in the COVID teleworking era. With this fundamental shift and as administrators consider an interconnected IoT (Internet of Things) environment, the boundary between the office, home, teleworker and user is converging. Security concerns with ever-increasing threat vectors are substantiated. How does one secure an IoT environment and guard against malware and outbreaks? How is the network impacted as some workloads shift to the cloud? Why do we cope with wired and wireless silos? The challenge lies in successfully transitioning the existing siloed campus into an integral data-driven model for clients, users and devices from IoT to cloud with a common experience, while addressing security and availability needs with lower operational costs. These are the key requirements of the third-generation campus evolution as shown in the figure below.

Security’s Role in Client to Cloud Networking

The Networking industry is undergoing a metamorphosis. Modern networking operations teams are challenged to cope with multiple operational models. As attackers become better and better at breaching our defenses, security analysts are increasingly at the heart of a security organization. The operators are responsible for detecting, investigating and remediating potential breaches before they progress into brand, customer, financial and IP damage. This confluence of DevOps, NetOps, SecOps, and CloudOps demands persistent operations control. How do you cope with decades of security, threat and cyber detection done in reactive silos? What happens as more workloads move to the cloud? At Arista, we value our ecosystem of security partners and networking must adapt to the new complex threats.

Security’s Role in Client to Cloud Networking

The Networking industry is undergoing a metamorphosis. Modern networking operations teams are challenged to cope with multiple operational models. As attackers become better and better at breaching our defenses, security analysts are increasingly at the heart of a security organization. The operators are responsible for detecting, investigating and remediating potential breaches before they progress into brand, customer, financial and IP damage. This confluence of DevOps, NetOps, SecOps, and CloudOps demands persistent operations control. How do you cope with decades of security, threat and cyber detection done in reactive silos? What happens as more workloads move to the cloud? At Arista, we value our ecosystem of security partners and networking must adapt to the new complex threats.

The CloudVision Journey

Traditional networking has been transformed by cloud-networking principles. These principles drive an open, software-first approach to efficient automation, granular telemetry, and proactive analytics that have simplified traditional network operations. At Arista, we align our product strategy to these cloud networking principles and build our products based on modern software approaches. One such approach is the network-wide state and inference-driven architecture to manage networks with CloudVision. Arista’s strategic approach to automation, analytics, and change control has made CloudVision one of the favorite choices in the menu for our enterprise customers.

The CloudVision Journey

Traditional networking has been transformed by cloud-networking principles. These principles drive an open, software-first approach to efficient automation, granular telemetry, and proactive analytics that have simplified traditional network operations. At Arista, we align our product strategy to these cloud networking principles and build our products based on modern software approaches. One such approach is the network-wide state and inference-driven architecture to manage networks with CloudVision. Arista’s strategic approach to automation, analytics, and change control has made CloudVision one of the favorite choices in the menu for our enterprise customers.

Journey Through Open Networking

Arista has a decade long history of collaboration in open networking. We have pushed the envelope, co-developed open platforms and deployed them to build the world’s largest cloud -scale networks.

Journey Through Open Networking

Arista has a decade long history of collaboration in open networking. We have pushed the envelope, co-developed open platforms and deployed them to build the world’s largest cloud -scale networks.

Next Generation Cognitive Networking

Just a decade ago, public cloud titans Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure Cloud, became synonymous with elastic scaling, and software provisioning through APIs. This was a phenomenon that didn’t exist within closed legacy systems.

Private clouds, by contrast, saw the relevance of enterprise customers recreating an infrastructure based on public cloud principles operating at a smaller scale. In an ideal world, both clouds would allow application developers to create and choose where to deploy applications without trade-offs. Arista pioneered technology development in this cloud networking category and today with Covid-19 restrictions driving millions of users to work-from-home, there are tremendous pressures on network access and bandwidth.

Next Generation Cognitive Networking

Just a decade ago, public cloud titans Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure Cloud, became synonymous with elastic scaling, and software provisioning through APIs. This was a phenomenon that didn’t exist within closed legacy systems.

Private clouds, by contrast, saw the relevance of enterprise customers recreating an infrastructure based on public cloud principles operating at a smaller scale. In an ideal world, both clouds would allow application developers to create and choose where to deploy applications without trade-offs. Arista pioneered technology development in this cloud networking category and today with Covid-19 restrictions driving millions of users to work-from-home, there are tremendous pressures on network access and bandwidth.

COVID-19 Response – A Letter from Our CEO

As a leading supplier of cloud networking equipment globally, Arista plays a critical role in supporting the cloud communications and computing infrastructure that will keep the world running during these difficult times. The rapid acceleration of Covid-19 developments across the world has been sudden and shocking. It has forced us to take a new perspective on gratitude for what we have, including our families, health and an opportunity to rethink our goals.

COVID-19 Response – A Letter from Our CEO

As a leading supplier of cloud networking equipment globally, Arista plays a critical role in supporting the cloud communications and computing infrastructure that will keep the world running during these difficult times. The rapid acceleration of Covid-19 developments across the world has been sudden and shocking. It has forced us to take a new perspective on gratitude for what we have, including our families, health and an opportunity to rethink our goals.

Cloud Networking Transformation Ahead

Networking is undergoing a metamorphosis. Today’s operations are challenged to cope with the DevOps, NetOps, SecOps and CloudOps models that need consistent operations control. Why should enterprises care? How do you cope with decades of legacy and is change possible? Arista believes that the networking world is at the cusp of a transformation, significantly facilitated by the agile, dynamic and economic network models of the public cloud providers. They have proven the elegance of simple yet scalable designs that transform siloed networks for the data center, core, campus or branch PINs (Places in the Network) into east west PICs(Places in the Cloud). This new paradigm is a far cry from the traditional siloed network architectures that required applications to be assigned to specific servers or storage, causing fixed-function rigidity. Agility and high availability are pivotal foundations to building the new PICs.

Beginning M&A at Arista

At Arista, we have led both the disruption and evolution of networking technology as entrepreneurs with proven customer success. The pride and passion for best of breed designs and foolproof quality principles has driven Arista’s core values and success. Getting it right, doing the right thing and defining what is “right” is a constant learning process. Sometimes this means complementing core products with the right mergers and acquisitions to boost Arista’s customer and platform impact.

The Road Ahead for Cloud Area Network Migration

CIOs today mandate a ‘Cloud First’ or a ‘Cloud Only’ model for new IT investments with three different cloud models. 

Bringing Cloud Principles to The Enterprise

As legacy applications evolveto the cloud, hosted and multi cloud architectures blending on-premises data and applications with elastic scale-out and rapidly deployed cloud capabilities, legacy networking tools have been challenged causing them to become cumbersome and unreliable. The shift to cloud native architectures with containers, serverless instances and edge IoT sensors feeding in critical data, has significantly increased the number of devices that need to be managed. Meanwhile shrinking the amount of time available for provisioning, upgrades and change controls has become an issue. 

Microsoft and Arista Cloud Decade

As we celebrate the 5^thAnniversary of Arista’s IPO this week at NYSE, we pause to reflect on this key milestone. Arista’s results are a tribute to the customers who chose us, appreciated our innovative technology and stood by us through our highs and lows. One key customer who played a pivotal part in the decade was Microsoft. Microsoft coincidentally was destined to be a part of our journey since 2008 when we were searching for a new name for our company. Our top choice was Azure, but the domain name was taken just a few weeks before we started our naming effort. Since then, Microsoft redefined the public cloud with Azure and Arista has become a critical foundation to enabling the scale, reach, reliability, and performance that have become synonymous with the Azure cloud.

Cognitive WiFi is Here

Last August, Arista made its first acquisition, Mojo Networks, to transform the future of WiFi and campus networks. Just as Arista disrupted the datacenter with important architectural and technology-based innovations, I believe this is a similar pioneering step for the campus. Over the past two decades, the industry has deployed a WiFi controller-based architecture. This stagnant “WLC” approach for wireless connectivity has not evolved to address costly operational dilemmas such as:

Open Cloud Networking-Redefined

Networking vendors have long touted distinct routers and switches with different LAN/WAN interfaces for different customer use cases. After three decades of evolution, Ethernet now truly addresses all aspects of the present state and the next generation of networking, making it possible to support these previously separate use cases from a single common platform, which flexibly incorporates new capabilities in an open, standards-based approach. Arista, together with an ecosystem of partners including Broadcom and Cloud Titan customers, has a history of collaborating in many industry forums to define these new networking capabilities, including OCP, 25/50G and COBO, while driving next generation optics such as OSFP and QSFP-DD.