Arista Networks Overview

Anshul Sadana, Senior Vice President of Customer Engineering, introduces Arista Networks and talks about their product lines and applications in modern networks.

In this presentation at Networking Field Day 10, Anshul Sadana delivers an in-depth overview of Arista Networks’ innovations and evolving approach to data center networking. He begins by describing the transition from traditional multi-tiered architectures to more streamlined one- and two-tier designs, such as Arista’s “Spline” design, which allows up to 2,000 non-blocking host connections. These scalable solutions are intended to meet the growing demands of modern enterprises and cloud data centers. Sadana also discusses their extensive support for Layer 2 and Layer 3 topologies, including large deployments of up to 220,000 servers using Layer 3 ECMP, and highlights VXLAN overlay capabilities for extending Layer 2 networks across data centers.

A key emphasis of Sadana’s talk is on network reliability and operational flexibility. He explains how Arista’s extensible operating system (EOS) and architectural philosophy enable high redundancy and efficient upgrades, avoiding the traditional outages associated with legacy systems. Arista’s pioneering Smart System Upgrade (SSU) allows for controller and operating system upgrades without downtime, even on single top-of-rack switches. The network has evolved from a focus on uptime to a focus on minimizing downtime, with automation playing a central role in provisioning, configuration management, monitoring, and decommissioning. Sadana outlines the benefits of such automation in large-scale environments and showcases Arista’s work on seamless integrations with tools like Splunk and custom telemetry platforms.

Finally, Sadana delves into Arista’s software programmability and the different strategies available for integrating with network infrastructure, culminating in Arista’s unique SysDB-based architecture. This allows for a high-performance, publish-subscribe model where multiple agents manage different features and states efficiently. He emphasizes Arista’s openness through robust APIs and SDKs, facilitating deep integrations and empowering customers to exert granular control over their networks. He also touches on Arista’s growth, now holding the number two market share in high-speed data center switching, and highlights their global footprint with expanded support centers and RMA depots. Overall, the session showcases Arista’s commitment to scalable, programmable, and customer-driven network innovation.