Video: Arista Networks and technology talk

While at SNW Europe I had the opportunity to visit the Arista Networks booth with my video camera in hand, and the guys on booth duty were good enough to allow me to shoot some footage while we talked about their products.

Enjoy the video and then feel free to comment on my thoughts below -



First up, Arista is start-up networking company, and like all networking companies…….. they have Cisco in their crosshairs.

Although low cost seems to be their trump card, to be fair to Arista they are also touting performance as another key advantage.  Better performance, literally at a fraction of the Cisco price - if the guys at the booth are to be believed.  However, as I mention in a previous post, there is more to value than price.  It may turn out to be very short sighted to jump all over short term cap-ex savings at the true expense of the long term good.

However, the current down economy is probably creating ‘too good to pass-up’ opportunities for companies like Arista, who come in at a value price-point- most companies being forced to think more and more about cost, thus creating windows of opportunity for those coming in at significantly lower price-points.

However, when at the booth, the Arista guys did a great job ensuring that their products didn’t have that ‘value’ feel.  Despite the fact that they are apparently way cheaper than Cisco, they weren’t over-stressing that point and wanted to talk a lot about performance.


Technology and performance overview

So a quick overview of what Arista have on the table from a product and performance point of view….

Basically they are offering high-speed low latency 10Gbps Ethernet products.  Oh and apparently they are cheap...cheap enough for my garage??.

However, if you listened closely to the video, they only have DCB/CEE “on the roadmap”.  This, in my opinion is a huge shortfall in the current shipping products.  As each day goes by I am becoming more and more of the opinion that to be a true data center switch, you need CEE and FCoE.  Yes, 10Gbps without the goodness of CEE and FCoE might suffice for now, however, it will be found wanting in the very near future.  More on this later though….

I am impressed at the published latencies and port count as well as the dual hot-swap power supplies and reversible airflow (to change the airflow from front-to-rear, to rear-to-front requires swapping out the fans).  However, my gut reaction is that this is almost a gimmick in comparison to features like CEE and FCoE. Sorry that I keep coming back to this but I can’t stress it enough.

NOTE:  In the interest of fairness, should point out that when at HP Colorado Springs recently I was knocked back when I was told that one of the hardest things to engineer for new servers and blade chassis is the power supply units (PSU).  So I am careful not to totally dismiss the reversible airflow and redundant hot plug PSUs as totally insignificant.