Arista Networks Platform Reviews

Great latency (bundled with great L1/L2/L3 features) depending on platforms.

There is a lot of room for improvement within the solution. Any product, however, can improve. No product is perfect.

The solution needs to accommodate new features.

I have personally made some recommendations in the past and hope to see this implemented in their product line.

I think there is a need for improvement in the area of their VXLAN/EVPN capability but their current solution is great regardless but may be not very scalable for a global deployment.

I've been using the solution for three years at this point. It's been a while.

Again, this depend on the solution and requirement. Arista has different models that can fit into small, medium and large datacenter. Scalability is a factor in any design for expansion.

Depending on the need and requirement, I have worked with different platforms including Cisco, Juniper and some security platforms such as Checkpoint, Fortinet, Cisco ASA and Juniper SRX.

Arista and Cisco are comparatively the same or Cisco a bit more expensive depending on the platforms. However, I like Arista's licensing approach. Cisco licensing could be made simpler.

Every industry is different, so what is going to work for a service provider might not really work for an enterprise environment. Requirement is key in any design proposal. 

Vendor/Platforms should tailored to the requirements and solutions.

We use the solution to provide multi-layer switches for the networks in our client's data centers, the majority of whom are based in the banking sector.

We find the CloudVision switching feature of this solution really useful.

The UI for this product is also very good: user-friendly and familiar feeling.

The stability of this solution needs to be improved as part of the next upgrade.

We have been working with this solution for about one year.

We have found this solution to be mostly stable, but we have occasionally had issues with buffering of the switches.

This solution has very good scalability.

The technical support team for this solution are very good and respond to our queries quickly. 

The initial setup of this solution is easy to carry out.

We would recommend this solution to other organizations in the banking sector.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

If you have a large network, it's one of the easiest solutions to deploy and manage.

The best part is the single operating system that they have. Regardless of your model, it's the same operating system functioning across the board, which means you don't have to worry about backward compatibilities between your older switches and the new ones that you deploy, which is a big plus when compared to maybe Cisco, HP, or Juniper, where you get into these different operating systems based on the model. 

Against that, if you look at the competitors, you always have to worry about the operating system that the older units are running on, and the integration between the old and new, and what are the limitations and stuff like that. All those questions you simply don't have to worry about when you talk about Arista. Therefore, the deployment becomes pretty easy.

The solution is very stable.

Technical support is extremely responsive and helpful.

The solution is quite expensive. One of the negative aspects of it is the pricing. 

I've used the solution for a while. I was an employee at Arista for a couple of years. In addition to that, I have almost four customers who have been using Arista.

The solution is absolutely stable. If you look at the customer base, that itself is a testimony. They have a very, very good customer base, and it's a pretty stable solution. Rarely we have encountered any challenges with Arista.

The solution works well for large-scale organizations.

The nice thing about technical support from Arista is you don't have to go through multiple levels of check-ups where there is someone who collects your information and stuff and then passes on the baton to someone else. That's not how they work. It's an engineer on the call who would directly help you out, which saves a lot of time and headache. The whole time with the technical support of Arista is significantly lower than others. My experience has been that when you call Arista tech support, your call is answered within a couple of minutes. Compared to the rest, where it could be 15 to 20 minutes at least, it's great. Arista is very quick on the response time when it comes to assistance.

I also have an understanding of Cisco, HP, and Juniper.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and simple. For roughly around 50 switches, you could deploy them in a day with the manpower of maybe two people.

Even for probably a network which is moderately sized, a couple of admins would do the job in terms of maintenance. They could deploy and just hold it. If you have a lot of changes to make every now and then they can handle it. That part would completely depend upon the operations that are carried out.

The product is fairly expensive. It's not a cheap option. Clients need to be ready to pay.

There's an annual license with Arista. Though the unit of calculation is monthly, the license has to be procured on an annual basis. It's an annual license, and again, it's pricy.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. The only negative that applies to them is the price.

I would recommend Arista for enterprises considering their price point, however, I would not recommend it for the SME/SMB market. Although it's a wonderful product, the price is something that an SME or SMB cannot afford.

The solution is primarily used for colocation services, as an extension for various platforms, and also mainly for new setups of data centers. They've played a role in top-of-the-rack features and also for data center extensions like VXLAN. 

We have users that use Arista for their financial software testing due to their low latencies.

The initial installation is very straightforward.

A company can scale the solution if it needs to.

The solution is very stable.

The solution needs to improve their product range. They've added a few items, however, they're a bit of a johnny-come-lately to a lot of other competitors in the space and they need to compete for more for the attention of various sizes of business. They basically need to include more models in their offering.

The one thing they lack is Microsegmentation solutions. In contrast, Cisco offers that. It has something called ACI, and we lose out on contracts due to the fact that Arista doesn't have a similar offering. Clients would like to have that on hand as when clients deal with the Cloud base, Microsoft segmentation can be managed with, in a sense, Analytics.

I've been dealing with the solution since 2017. It's been a few years now.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any stability issues with it for the most part. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's good.

The solution can scale if you need it to. 

Technical support has been very good. They're quite helpful and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support we get. For solutions like Nutanix and Arista, I'm never disappointed with the service we get.

The initial setup is mostly straightforward. It just really depends on the scope. There are different discussions that need to precede the installation of it, so that might take a week or two. You still talk to the customer, you make a design, you get the approval, and all of that. However, once you have all of that, if you take that implementation, you're looking at probably, one day to one-and-a-half days just to configure everything. The configuration is very important. Once you have the configuration, putting it in with the switches take a minimum amount of time. 

You likely need two to three people to handle the implementation.

Arista is largely a cloud player catering to the Googles, the Facebooks and all the big players. Price-wise we have a disadvantage pitching Arista, especially against somebody like Cisco who has been in the sector for a long time. We are often fighting Cisco from the pricing perspective with their larger productions and licenses.

In terms of licensing, there are costs related to both licensing and support. We pay for licensing yearly.

We are a distributor of the solution.

I would recommend the solution. Overall, I would rate it at a nine out of ten.

We use it more like a complete network operations center.

It provides telemetry and visibility for many metrics that are not supported by most of the other vendors. Out of the box, no third party solutions are needed.

CloudVision is the central management, and all the features installed are from the same vendor. I like that telemetry and metrics are available. Also, the provisioning feature and all these features are from the same vendor.

The cost of Arista Networks Platform is high; it is more expensive than other networking solutions.

Also, the community is good but is not good enough. It still needs to grow more.

Maybe, if they had out-of-the-box NetFlow features to integrate with third party solutions, it will be good.

I've been working with it for about 10 months now as a system integrator.

We sell physical appliances to our customers for their on-premises deployment.

One of our future customers will use Arista Networks Platform to support around 1,500 employees.

Two technicians would be sufficient for deployment because with Arista Networks Platform, you have the Zero Touch Provisioning feature. You have simple management, which reduces the number of hands needed to work with the solution.

Cost wise, Arista Networks Platform is more expensive than other networking solutions.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution at nine.