Collapsing hierarchical, multi-tiered networks of the past into more compact, resilient, feature rich, two-tiered, leaf-spine or SplineTM networks have clear advantages in the data center. The benefits of more scalable and more stable layer 3 networks far outweigh the challenges this architecture creates. Layer 2 networking fabrics of the past lacked stability and scale. This legacy architecture limited workload size, mobility, and confined virtual workloads to a smaller set of physical servers. As virtualization scaled in the data center, the true limitations of these fabrics quickly surfaced

Consumers are now heavily invested in mobile access for applications and content. This shift in consumption models is driving new business requirements and creating new challenges for Telcos, from increasingly high bandwidth Over-The-Top (OTT) traffic and competition from the cloud providers. Instead of competing directly with public cloud offerings, Telcos is instead adopting cloud principles to deliver its network services in a more efficient manner. Some are providing cloud connection services to their existing customers to provide secure VPN access to the public cloud.

For many years, one of the biggest challenges in network design has been effectively managing traffic flow end-to-end across the network. Stated more specifically: How is traffic intelligently classified and path engineered throughout the network? Furthermore, how can this traffic be classified into differentiated levels of service, without adding unnecessary complication to management, control plane or data plane state in this critically important part of the network?

It’s simply not good enough to have a great and scalable network alone. A data center can have tens of thousands of compute, storage and network devices, presenting a large operational challenge to IT. In addition, as the network is scaling, IT is being asked to reduce operational expenses and increase responsiveness to changing business needs.

Architecting a fault tolerant and resilient network fabric is only one part of the challenge facing network managers and operations teams today. It is simply not good enough to build a scalable fault tolerant network. Typical data centers can range from tens, to hundreds if not thousands of networking devices.

The network is the enabler of new business models as well as the nervous system for all communications, entertainment, commerce and regulations. Network availability, performance, scale, automation, and security are now fundamental business requirements driving next-generation cloud, carrier, and enterprise networks. The underlying network operating system (NOS) provides the critical software foundation and is the core of this nervous system that enables businesses to operate in the modern world 

The Arista advantage has resulted in a fast-growing company that has emerged to become the second leading player in the high-speed 10/40/100GbE switching market in the data center. Arista has achieved this by focusing solely on building the best products for the needs of high performance cloud data centers, and by building an organizational strategy and supporting structure that enables our customers to interact directly with our engineering team to explore and develop new products and features. We have a deep pool of executive talent that has successfully built innovative organizations and products across the industry over the past several decades, and who have brought innovation and dynamism back to networking.

. The Arista Advantage

The purpose and scope of this white paper is to discuss spanning tree interoperability between Arista and Cisco switches. It is written in a manner that assumes the reader has at least a moderate working knowledge of spanning tree protocol configuration and operation. Detailed explanations of the basic functionality of each spanning tree protocol is outside the scope of this document.

. Spanning Tree Protocol Interoperability with Cisco

Arista Networks and PacketLight Networks have jointly developed and tested a set of solutions that leverage Arista’s market leading 100GbE port density and the PacketLight Networks PL-1000GM and PL-1000T. These solutions deliver a series of cost effective and scalable distance extension and media conversion solutions.

. Arista and PacketLight Networks 100GbE Distance Extension and Conversion

Arista Networks and MRV have jointly developed and tested a set of solutions that leverages Arista switches’ market leading 100GbE port density and MRV's market leading Optical Transport series to deliver cost effective and efficient distance extension and media conversion solutions. Interoperability testing was performed with a MRV LambdaDriver 400L.

.Distance Extension and Conversion Solutions for 100G

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