Arista introduces network applications with VMware and Microsoft

The three new Arista EOS applications are:
? OpenWorkload - simplified networking for virtualized and cloud environments. Enables a distributed system of network switches to support truly mobile workloads. Arista and VMware collaborated to enable Arista EOS switches to seamlessly integrate with VMware NSX™, the platform for network virtualization, to provide hardware-based gateway services for non-virtualized servers and existing VLANs. Arista is also integrating with OpenStack and other orchestration platforms to provide automated provisioning, stateful workload portability and total workload visibility.
? Smart System Upgrade - reducing the burden caused by network upgrades, minimizing application downtime, and reducing the risks taken during critical change controls. Provides a fully customizable suite of features that tightly couples data center infrastructure partners, such as Microsoft, F5 and Palo Alto Networks. Microsoft’s Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) allows devices to be seamlessly taken out or put into service. This helps customers stay current on the latest software releases without unnecessary downtime or systemic outages.
? Network Telemetry - a new model for faster troubleshooting from fault detection to fault isolation. Streams data about network state, including both underlay and overlay network statistics, to applications from Splunk, ExtraHop, Corvil and Riverbed. With critical infrastructure information exposed to the application layer, issues can be proactively avoided.

“Businesses are increasingly deploying network virtualization to simplify IT and improve the speed of business,” said Milin Desai, director, product management, VMware. “VMware and Arista are partnering to integrate Arista EOS-based and VMware NSX™ to enable the same operational model to be used for both virtual and physical workloads, resulting in increased efficiency and agility for the data center operator."

“With Microsoft’s standards-based approach to datacenter management, customers benefit from a plug-and-play experience when they use Arista’s OMI-enables switches,” said Vijay Tewari, Principal Group Program Manager, Windows Server and System Center, at Microsoft. “These switches have met the requirements to carry the Windows Logo, so they just work with Windows Server and System Center 2012 R2 without the need for additional software.”

Software Defined Cloud Networking
Arista Software Defined Cloud Networking (SDCN) combines the principles that have made cloud computing the unstoppable force that it is: automation, self service provisioning, and linear scaling of both performance and economics, coupled with the recent trend in SDN that delivers network virtualization, custom programmability, simplified architectures, and more realistic price points. This combination creates a best-in-class software foundation for maximizing the value of the network to both the enterprise and service provider data center: a new architecture for the most mission-critical location within the IT infrastructure that simplifies management and provisioning, speeds up service delivery, lowers costs and creates opportunities for competitive differentiation, while putting control and visibility back in the hands of the network and systems administrators.
“Arista’s EOS continues to outpace the industry with Software Defined Networking (SDN) innovations, exposing innovative network applications and delivering a set of advanced SDN capabilities that support programmatic control, enhanced monitoring, and self-healing resilience,” stated Anshul Sadana, Senior Vice President, Customer Engineering at Arista Networks. “The architecture of Arista EOS, coupled with best-in-class hardware and partnerships with the other best-of-breed companies in each category creates network capabilities unachievable by monolithic providers. The integration and demonstration of VMware NSX with EOS at VMworld is a clear example of this best in class partnership.”

Arista EOS - Designed for SDCN
Arista’s EOS is the foundation needed for using open controller APIs to communicate between the network and the SDN controller to implement cloud-scale Layer 2/3 networking. The virtual and physical network must co-exist and are not mutually exclusive. Arista platforms have the ability to apply a variety of forwarding actions, enabling flow-granular control over network traffic at full line rate on all ports simultaneously. Arista’s new platforms have support for tunnel encapsulation, with advanced schemes that scale beyond the MAC table limitations of individual devices.
Arista’s EOS software can host the client portion of any controller-based system, communicating with the central controller and programming the switch’s forwarding plane accordingly through the EOS System Database. With support for flow monitoring, auto-initialization of zero-touch deployment of large numbers of switches (ZTP/ZTR), early notification of application caused network congestion (LANZ) and advanced event triggers (AEM), Arista switches running EOS are an ideal choice for SDN controlled cloud networks.

The Universal Cloud Network
A single leaf-spine architecture with a single consistent software image has been universally accepted as the way to build cost effective scalable multi-purpose networks. Using Layer-3 load-balancing to provide scalable performance. With the Arista 7500E as the spine and Arista 7150/7050 as the leaf, these network topologies can support cloud data centers with more than 100,000 servers that deliver consistent performance for dynamically scaling workloads in public or private clouds, including Hadoop, Big Data, storage, Web 2.0, VM farms, and network virtualization.