Cognitive Campus Network
The Next Frontier in Campus
Arista’s vision and framework for the Cognitive Campus Network leverages cloud capabilities and state-of-the-art merchant silicon to deliver critical services that automate deployment, configuration, visibility, troubleshooting and security. The Arista Cognitive Campus delivers spline, leaf and wireless infrastructure platforms, telemetry and analytics, and a single Image EOS that supports an ecosystem of solutions from industry leading partners.
Splines for Collapsed Campus Fabric
Arista has uniquely extended cloud grade capabilities to the campus with the modular 7300X3 and fixed 7050X3 platforms. These spline platforms are designed to provide a suite of cognitive features and actions for high availability and simplicity. Self-healing, hitless upgrades and live patching are cognitive actions that avoid impact on the infrastructure. Arista’s Smart System Upgrade (SSU) feature enables switch operating software to be completely upgraded while the platform continues to process campus traffic.
The X3 series switches provide a variety of connectivity options: 1-10G, multi-rate 10/25G SFP+, 40G, 50G and 100G QSFP. These platforms support dynamic load balancing and buffer allocation available to all networked ports to help avoid data loss from link faults, congestion or micro-bursts. The splines work with all devices that support static or dynamic port aggregation to preserve and enhance the installed base investment.
Cognitive Arista EOS
Arista EOS provides a common software foundation for the cognitive campus network. The transformational Extensible Operating System (EOS) brings its baseline advantages to the campus with cloud grade control, monitoring, virtualization, scale and reliability. Arista’s unique self-healing architecture isolates software defects, supports live patching and redefines hitless upgrade and rollback. The same binary EOS image is used across Arista’s entire product line. Doing so ensures EOS quality and reliability is consistently validated across the thousands of Arista customer data center, cloud and campus networks.
Open standard APIs in EOS support industry leading DevOps, monitoring solutions. Core to Arista’s EOS architecture is NetDB: the network-wide, state-driven, publish-subscribe-notify database. Unlike legacy polling or inter-processor communication (IPC) schemes, NetDB is purpose-built to share all state in real time. Streaming of real-time data is complete and efficient, communicating thousands of state changes at sub-second intervals to monitoring platforms using open JSON over HTTP. Implementing dynamic JSON dictionaries means NetDB can dynamically evolve, sharing new, additional key/value information to monitoring tools.
Cognitive Leaf POE Switches
With the release of the 720XP series switches, Arista extends cognitive campus management and monitoring services to the wiring closet, delivering connectivity, security, and power for all campus user workloads. The suite of platforms offers a variety of connection options for user desktops, POE appliances and IoT devices. Managed 802.3af-t/bt power services deliver up to 60W, with speed options ranging from 10Mbps to 5Gbps (MGig) over UTP, to support a variety of campus workloads. Modular SFP and QSFP uplinks support speeds from 1Gbps to 100Gbps which offer flexibility in network architecture and scalability. The 720XP runs Arista’s common binary EOS, providing a comprehensive set of layer 2 and layer 3 open standard features including MLAG stacking, .1Q, EVPN/VXLAN virtualization, and table stakes QoS services. Arista EOS supports standards based 802.1X and RADIUS access control and LLDP device identification services to automate admission and segmentation of appliances, users, and applications in the campus.
The X3 Spline and 720XP series share the same architecture, designed to provide dynamic traffic load balancing, and real time flow monitoring of all campus workloads.
Cognitive Management Plane
There is a striking contrast between the maturity and robustness that has evolved in the data and control planes, and the lack thereof in the management plane. Arista’s CloudVision incorporates our cornerstone Cognitive Management Plane (CMP) to automate deployments, simplify infrastructure, user and application monitoring, anticipate errors, and avoid outages across all Arista platforms in real time. CloudVision harnesses the capabilities of cloud computing, big data, and machine learning, collecting and archiving all network state over time.
CloudVision’s Cognitive Management Plane ingests all streaming state from EOS platforms while its open APIs allow data sharing with other applications, either custom developed or from third parties. This allows administrators the flexibility to use best-of- breed tools for data-driven actions and analysis. The Cognitive Management Plane’s API conveys commands as well as telemetry to allow configuration management tools to control the campus infrastructure. Together with NetDB’s schema and native OpenConfig APIs, Arista’s CMP fulfills customer’s requirements for standards, openness and flexibility with flexible management and actions.
Cognitive WiFi Edge
Arista’s distributed data plane architecture for WiFi embeds manageability, telemetry and segmentation within the access points. This controller-less architecture continues to evolve with Arista’s Wi-Fi 6 enabled, cognitive access points. Updated Gen2 802.11ax radio technology supports upstream/ downstream MU-MIMO and OFDMA transmission which greatly improves performance and user density compared to WiFi 5 and earlier Gen1 802.11ax systems. Packaged with a third scanning radio, and optional BLE, Arista WiFi 6 delivers the highest performance, utility and security to the wireless campus edge. Combining location and scanning radios with AI/ML heuristics in Arista’s CloudVision WiFi Manager, gives network administrators new capabilities in mobile client monitoring and location.
