Technology Bulletins

Cloud computing has rapidly evolved over the last few years. From humble origins rooted in virtualization and concepts of service-oriented architectures, it continues to emerge as a favored operational model of next generation data center deployments. The business theory and cost savings of on-demand capacity models is sound. With virtualized hardware and operating systems production ready, what’s the next step to creating a a fully automated data center environment?

Arista Networks’ Latency Analyzer (LANZ) represents a revolution in integrated network visibility performance monitoring. For the first time, administrators and applications gain near real-time visibility into congestion conditions as experienced by the network itself.

Hadoop and other distributed systems are increasingly the solution of choice for next generation data volumes. A high capacity, any-to-any, easily manageable networking layer is critical for peak Hadoop performance. Data analytics has become a key element of the business decision process over the last decade, and the ability to process unprecedented volumes of data a consequent deliverable and differentiator in the information economy

Hadoop is unique in that it has a ‘rack aware’ file system - it actually understands the relationship between which servers are in which cabinet and which switch supports them. With this information it is able to better distribute data and ensure that a copy of each set of data is distributed across different servers connected to different switches. This prevents any single switch failure from causing data loss.

Next generation TAP Aggregation from Arista makes it possible to cost-effectively and losslessly monitor all network traffic, while capturing and analyzing only the traffic that is needed. Disruptive economics, programmable operations and an architecture that is built to last.

. TAP Aggregation

The relentless rise of traffic levels across data networks has created a challenge for even the most high-performance security devices. To tackle these ever-changing and demanding traffic profiles, Arista Networks and Palo Alto Networks have partnered to deliver unique solutions for enterprises. This brief will give a high-level overview of the partnership between Arista and Palo Alto Networks and a symmetric scaling solution to increase firewall capacity.

.Palo Alto Networks and Arista Solution Brief

Arista Networks has partnered with Palo Alto Networks to help our customers scale to the performance demands on their networks. While the initial goal was to build a 100 Gbps firewall cluster, the actual solution scale is only limited by the physical number of ports on the switch and can be used by any network-based appliance. Leveraging the extensibility built into every Arista Extensible Modular Operating System (EOS)TM, the Arista OpenFlow Direct Mode, and the unique deployment options offered by the Palo Alto Networks virtual-wire mode, we are able to deliver scale while ensuring flow symmetry.

. Arista Scale with Symmetry Guide

Learn more about Arista's definition of scalability of a datacenter network, the critical requirements and the issues that must be solved to address datacenter scalability.

.Scaling Datacenter Networks

The Arista OpenStack solution automates the provisioning of VLANs on Arista switches to work in concert with the OVS plugin. This is in contrast to the other OpenStack plugins available today, which allow deployment of either the virtual switch plugin or the hardware device plugin, but not both. The architecture implemented is open and vendor agnostic.Providing this capability within the OpenStack solution is a significant achievement for integration with physical network devices. The availability of the drivers published back into the OpenStack community by Arista Networks can lead to truly multi-vendor solutions for VLAN provisioning automation within OpenStack environments.

. Arista OpenStack Integration

Arista DANZ on the 7150 platform enables scalable end-to-end monitoring directly integrated into the data path, or as a more traditional dedicated observation network. At the core of these capabilities are advanced monitoring, TAP aggregation, and precision time stamping. A rich management API complements these core capabilities, as well as precision time synchronization enabling precision large scale captures and direct integration with open and enterprise application analysis tools. This tech note will expound upon core capabilities of advanced monitoring, aggregation, and time stamping, demonstrating how they can be utilized to remove some of the traditional analysis bottlenecks and design constraints.

. Advanced Monitoring and TAP Aggregation