Arista Presents at Mobility Field Day 14

Arista Campus & WLAN 2026 Update

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At Mobility Field Day 14, Arista COO Todd Nightingale provided an in-depth update on the company’s expanding presence and technology innovations within the campus networking and wireless LAN markets. Highlighting Arista’s historic reputation for high performance and exceptional reliability in the data center, the presenters detailed how these foundational strengths have been methodically brought into the campus and mobility space over the last seven years. The presentation focused heavily on Arista’s core pillars, always-on reliability, zero-trust security strategies, and zero-touch intelligent operations, which are all uniquely unified under a single Extensible Operating System (EOS) binary across the entire network architecture from hyperscaler data centers down to the smallest campus branch access points.

A central theme of the presentation was the introduction of Arista’s observability fabric, a system driven by state streaming that records and uploads every single network state change into a unified data lake (NetDL) for perfect fidelity and advanced forensics. This deep, consistent data foundation is what empowers AVA, Arista’s multi-domain, agentic AI operations platform, giving it a significant market advantage in automated troubleshooting and remediation. On the security and network admission front, Arista highlighted its AGNI NAC solution and micro-segmentation capabilities, clarifying that while they are a dedicated networking and communications company rather than a SASE vendor, they focus on delivering best-in-class network-layer security and deep ecosystem partnerships.

The technical deep-dive reviewed Arista’s cognitive distributed architecture, where control plane functions run dynamically at the edge on access points without requiring a hardware controller, ensuring uninterrupted client authentication and hitless upgrades even if management plane connectivity is lost. Additionally, the speakers highlighted the unique advantages of Arista’s tri-band multi-function radio, which acts as a 24/7 environment scanner and can be converted into a client to run proactive synthetic tests for end-to-end visibility. The session concluded with updates on major developments over the past year, including the rollout of Arista Vespa (Virtual Ethernet Segment with Proxy ARP) for large-scale Layer 2 roaming domains and inter-data center resiliency, alongside the expansion of their Wi-Fi 7 portfolio with the introduction of new directional antenna access points, the indoor C460D and outdoor O435D, set to ship in the second half of the year.

Personnel: Sri Ventkiteswaran, Todd Nightingale

Arista AVA – Agentic AlOps Platform & Demo

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Ken Duda, CTO, showcases Arista’s innovative approach to network management using artificial intelligence. The presentation highlights One AVA, a standalone application that integrates multiple tools within the Arista suite, such as Cloud Vision, CVQ, AGNI, VeloCloud, and NDR, to provide a unified troubleshooting experience. Powered by large language models (LLMs) and advanced techniques like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), AVA operates autonomously by constantly analyzing sessions, extracting learnings, and managing customer-specific memory databases within the secure Network Data Lake (NetDL). This architecture helps bridge the gap between deterministic software logic and probabilistic LLM behaviors, enabling operators to streamline troubleshooting workflows.

During the demonstration, the speakers walk through several realistic scenarios, including how a trouble ticket initiated by a webhook triggers an autonomous investigation by AVA. The assistant leverages skill documents, performs endpoint searches, checks Wi-Fi connectivity records, and even runs continuous reachability tests to isolate issues, such as a misconfigured firewall rule or a lack of RADSec connection. The human-in-the-loop design ensures that any corrective adjustments, like updating ACL policies or deploying access point configurations, require explicit administrator approval before execution. This process is supplemented by synthetic client connectivity tests run by the access point’s multi-function fourth radio, allowing AVA to validate end-to-end network resolution directly from the client’s perspective.

The presentation addresses practical enterprise concerns, particularly regarding security, data privacy, and the inherent unpredictability of LLMs. To maintain strict data isolation, AVA isolates each customer’s learnings and historical context within their specific tenancy, using human engineers rather than automated AI to generalize new skills for the broader knowledge base. Additionally, the platform mitigates risks from malicious data poisoning and prompt injection by strictly enforcing role-based access control (RBAC) and routing all structural network changes through formal change-control processes rather than executing them blindly. Ultimately, Arista positions AVA not as a replacement for human engineering, but as an essential, proactive assistant that turns reactive network troubleshooting into a highly efficient, data-rich operational workflow.

Personnel: Ken Duda, Sri Ventkiteswaran

Arista CV-AGNI On-Premises Architecture & Demos

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In this presentation by Arista at Mobility Field Day 14, Suparna Dam introduces the on-premises architecture of the AGNI product, focusing on its scaling capabilities and the innovative AGNI Cluster Config Manager (ACCM). The session covers how AGNI delivers features like updates, remote monitoring through a secure HTTPS tunnel, and data protection, ensuring the cluster remains functional even during temporary tunnel disruptions. The discussion details the node structure, including principal, standby, and auxiliary nodes, and outlines deployment flexibility across different scaling tiers. Dam also addresses the real-world operational challenges of managing large network access control (NAC) clusters and demonstrates how ACCM resolves these issues by transitioning from a monolithic setup to a highly managed, localized architecture.

The presentation emphasizes that while AGNI is available as both a cloud and an on-premises solution, the on-premises deployment introduces a unique architecture that maintains a secure HTTPS tunnel to the AGNI Cloud. This tunnel allows Arista’s site reliability engineering (SRE) team to proactively monitor system health factors like CPU and disk usage without leaking customer data or interrupting operations if connectivity drops. On-premises clusters are built using three types of nodes: a read-write principal node acting as the administrative leader, a standby node serving as a designated survivor for high availability, and auxiliary nodes utilized for horizontal scaling. Dam explains that the system supports up to 500,000 sessions per cluster and requires a replication latency of under 700 milliseconds alongside Layer 3 connectivity across all nodes, making configuration management across geographically diverse environments highly precise.

To overcome the inherent risks of managing massive monolithic clusters, such as the global impact of an incorrect configuration or tedious node-by-node upgrades, Arista introduced ACCM to decouple cluster management from execution. This centralized control plane breaks large deployments into smaller, distinct clusters managed through a single interface, featuring a dedicated staging cluster to safely test changes. Operators can modify and validate configurations or system upgrades on the staging cluster, save the state with a tracking tag, and then selectively roll out the audited changes to specific production clusters one at a time. The accompanying live demo illustrates this workflow by creating sequential configuration tags, pushing a localized differential policy update, and triggering an automated cluster upgrade that sequentially updates principal and secondary nodes without requiring manual individual intervention.

Personnel: Suparna Dam