Arista Networks Platform Reviews

We use it more like a complete network operations center.

It provides telemetry and visibility for many metrics that are not supported by most of the other vendors. Out of the box, no third party solutions are needed.

CloudVision is the central management, and all the features installed are from the same vendor. I like that telemetry and metrics are available. Also, the provisioning feature and all these features are from the same vendor.

The cost of Arista Networks Platform is high; it is more expensive than other networking solutions.

Also, the community is good but is not good enough. It still needs to grow more.

Maybe, if they had out-of-the-box NetFlow features to integrate with third party solutions, it will be good.

I've been working with it for about 10 months now as a system integrator.

We sell physical appliances to our customers for their on-premises deployment.

One of our future customers will use Arista Networks Platform to support around 1,500 employees.

Two technicians would be sufficient for deployment because with Arista Networks Platform, you have the Zero Touch Provisioning feature. You have simple management, which reduces the number of hands needed to work with the solution.

Cost wise, Arista Networks Platform is more expensive than other networking solutions.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution at nine.

The solution is primarily used for colocation services, as an extension for various platforms, and also mainly for new setups of data centers. They've played a role in top-of-the-rack features and also for data center extensions like VXLAN. 

We have users that use Arista for their financial software testing due to their low latencies.

The initial installation is very straightforward.

A company can scale the solution if it needs to.

The solution is very stable.

The solution needs to improve their product range. They've added a few items, however, they're a bit of a johnny-come-lately to a lot of other competitors in the space and they need to compete for more for the attention of various sizes of business. They basically need to include more models in their offering.

The one thing they lack is Microsegmentation solutions. In contrast, Cisco offers that. It has something called ACI, and we lose out on contracts due to the fact that Arista doesn't have a similar offering. Clients would like to have that on hand as when clients deal with the Cloud base, Microsoft segmentation can be managed with, in a sense, Analytics.

I've been dealing with the solution since 2017. It's been a few years now.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any stability issues with it for the most part. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's good.

The solution can scale if you need it to. 

Technical support has been very good. They're quite helpful and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support we get. For solutions like Nutanix and Arista, I'm never disappointed with the service we get.

The initial setup is mostly straightforward. It just really depends on the scope. There are different discussions that need to precede the installation of it, so that might take a week or two. You still talk to the customer, you make a design, you get the approval, and all of that. However, once you have all of that, if you take that implementation, you're looking at probably, one day to one-and-a-half days just to configure everything. The configuration is very important. Once you have the configuration, putting it in with the switches take a minimum amount of time. 

You likely need two to three people to handle the implementation.

Arista is largely a cloud player catering to the Googles, the Facebooks and all the big players. Price-wise we have a disadvantage pitching Arista, especially against somebody like Cisco who has been in the sector for a long time. We are often fighting Cisco from the pricing perspective with their larger productions and licenses.

In terms of licensing, there are costs related to both licensing and support. We pay for licensing yearly.

We are a distributor of the solution.

I would recommend the solution. Overall, I would rate it at a nine out of ten.

Great latency (bundled with great L1/L2/L3 features) depending on platforms.

There is a lot of room for improvement within the solution. Any product, however, can improve. No product is perfect.

The solution needs to accommodate new features.

I have personally made some recommendations in the past and hope to see this implemented in their product line.

I think there is a need for improvement in the area of their VXLAN/EVPN capability but their current solution is great regardless but may be not very scalable for a global deployment.

I've been using the solution for three years at this point. It's been a while.

Again, this depend on the solution and requirement. Arista has different models that can fit into small, medium and large datacenter. Scalability is a factor in any design for expansion.

Depending on the need and requirement, I have worked with different platforms including Cisco, Juniper and some security platforms such as Checkpoint, Fortinet, Cisco ASA and Juniper SRX.

Arista and Cisco are comparatively the same or Cisco a bit more expensive depending on the platforms. However, I like Arista's licensing approach. Cisco licensing could be made simpler.

Every industry is different, so what is going to work for a service provider might not really work for an enterprise environment. Requirement is key in any design proposal. 

Vendor/Platforms should tailored to the requirements and solutions.

We use three different models of the 7000 series switches to make up the network in one of our data centers. We use the 7060SX as an active leaf, the 7260 as a border leaf, and the 7500 series as the spines.

The most valuable feature is the Linux shell, which is useful for troubleshooting or capturing traffic. 

The documentation for this solution needs to be improved. In the documentation, it is not easy to find the exact solution which describes the configuration step by step. It means that we've had to ask our supplier how to use certain features, and which commands to use. We can find a simple description on the website, as well as a list of the features, but a more complete description is not available. It is not clear exactly how to configure and use each of the features. For other vendors, we can find the exact configuration, with examples, that we need to deploy for any new features.

The documentation did not explain that we could not vary the speed between ports that are in the same block. For example, we cannot have 1G and 10G on the neighboring ports. All four ports have to be 1G or 10G, which was very annoying for us when we realized that we needed to change the configuration and the cabling that we had already prepared.

In the next release of this solution, we would like the option to use two switches as one virtual switch.

The CVP management platform needs to be improved.

This solution is quite stable if the configuration is done according to the best practices. We found, however, that when we made some changes, we ran into problems.

These were temporary changes for test purposes. Nowhere was it explained that making these types of changes could lead to the problems that we observed, or that we would have any trouble. One such problem was that the utilization of links was very high because of an error in our test configuration.

Generally speaking, this is a very stable solution.

In our environment it is scalable. We can find the proper models to meet our requirements. I'm not sure how it would be in the case of very large networks, but in our data center there are a few hundred switches, so it is scalable.

We have thousands of users who use this network. This includes internal and external clients for our data center.

The technical support for this solution is quite good, but the deepness of the explanation in the documentation is not as good as I expect.

Most of the equipment that I have used is Cisco, although I have also used Juniper and Cumulus. For this new type of data center architecture, however, we did not use a solution prior to this one.

The initial setup of the individual switches is simple.

Using the Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) feature with the CloudVision Portal (CVP) is not simple, and it takes quite a long time.

Each of the switches can be deployed in about ten minutes, after several restarts, using the management interface. If I deploy using the command line then it will take a minute or two.

The CVP is supposed to be automated, but it is rather complicated and takes time.

For the initial deployment, we needed the help of our local supplier, the Arista representative. It was very helpful for us because we could not find good examples on the website. The best practices were descriptive from a very high-level view and did not contain detailed configuration examples.

I think that it would be very hard to prepare the whole configuration for the data center architecture without the help of our local supplier and Arista engineers.

This solution was my first experience with the new, modern data center architecture.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this series of switches is to carefully check the features that are supported on each model. Some new features are not supported on all platforms. I know that Arista still sells some old models that do not support the newest features.

This is a good solution, but the documentation needs to be improved. More detailed configuration examples are definitely needed.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Arista provides a stable infrastructure, and the devices' performance and throughput are higher than expected. It offers good support services as well. 

We have been using Arista Networks Platform for two years.

The platform is easy to scale, but since the deployment, there has been no need or requirement to expand the infrastructure. I believe scalability will be easy whenever it's required.

We have a team to maintain the infrastructure and a support agreement with Arista in case of any issues. They respond immediately.

Positive

We have used Cisco and HP as well.

Both companies provide similar services, but Arista's support services are much better than Cisco's.

We provided professional service to the vendor and encountered no issues during the installation and deployment. It took less than four months to complete the process. 

Network devices are generally expensive. However, during the evaluation, Arista was the most inexpensive vendor.

I rate Arista Networks Platform a nine out of ten.

Arista Networks Platform has a feature that helps with monitoring and management. 

I want the solution to include a unified controller. 

I have been working with the solution for three years. 

The product is very stable. It has a high stability point. 

Arista Networks Platform is scalable. 

Arista Networks Platform's technical support is very effective. 

The tool's setup is easy. We rely on two people for deployment. 

Arista Networks Platform is a flexible, scalable and easy-to-manage solution. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.