Arista Networks Platform Reviews

We use the Arista Networks Platform for our data center features.

The most valuable features of the Arista Networks Platform are the EVPN and VXLAN. It has comprehensive features.

The overall price of the Arista Networks Platform is expensive. It should be reduced.

I have been using the Arista Networks Platform for approximately four years.

Arista Networks Platform is stable.

The scalability of the Arista Networks Platform is good.

I was satisfied with the technical support.

We used Extreme previously.

The initial setup of the Arista Networks Platform is straightforward. It took use approximately a half-day to complete.

We did the implementation in-house.

The price of the Arista Networks Platform could be less expensive for the hardware and license.

My advice to others is to learn from the Arista team to have better knowledge and understanding before deployment. It does help.

I rate Arista Networks Platform a nine out of ten.

What we're frequently using in Arista Networks Platform is CloudVision. It's what we found most valuable.

An area for improvement we see in Arista Networks Platform is its integration, e.g. it needs to have more integration with its new products. It should have good integration with multiple wireless, security, and other products they recently acquired. Everybody needs just one dashboard, e.g. we are looking at where we can monitor all the other products which Arista Networks Platform has recently acquired.

Incorporating more security and cloud in terms of the journey to digital transformation is also another area for improvement in Arista Networks Platform, because more and more companies would like to have the incorporation of both cloud and security into their firmware.

An additional feature we'd like to see in the next release of Arista Networks Platform has everything to do with permissions. If you're looking at interfacing with other vendors, they need to have open protocols like API, so that it becomes easier for threat backing integration.

We've been dealing with Arista Networks Platform over the last four years.

Arista Networks Platform provides good support.

The deployment of Arista Networks Platform was very straightforward.

We're using both Arista Networks Platform and Aruba switches. We use Aruba switches mainly for wireless and campus, while Arista Networks Platform we are using more for the data center.

We are a distributor for Arista and Aruba.

Deployment for Arista Networks Platform is on-premises, with a bit of public cloud, but most of the deployment is on-premises.

I would put Arista Networks Platform at a ten out of ten rating, particularly because of their support and their features.

We are manufacturers for certain storage platforms and we have our own storage software for enabling GPU clustering. We work more in the video segment. We have our own solutions that we put on that particular cluster which enable a remote workspace management portal for people who are into content. We don't generally provide solutions for micro-level storage customers that are dealing with your retail data or the like. We specialize in macro-computing, video analytics, audio/video editing solutions, editing over the cloud, and remote editing of spaces. It's a very specialized platform.

We set up a private cloud architecture for customers. There are certain customers who are large-scale photo editors, video editors — companies like BBC — that are in the content business. They don't want their content to be on multi-user platforms. They want to have control of their platforms. We have a solution where they can have a YouTube-like experience, but it's totally private. We have very bespoke solutions for media-related mining.

Arista is a nice platform. It's an extremely reliable platform for the network switches we use.

We have never seen a project where people have complained that it's not working. Never.

We have found their networks to be very high-end, low-latency, and we have never had a problem scaling up.

Generally, Arista's technical support is prompt. There can be delays but they're not bad. When we go back to them, they get the job done. They are very good at support.

Overall, Arista is a good team to work with. They are very straightforward.

Arista is very expensive. Not everybody is in a position to spend $70,000 to $80,000 for one switch.

For our customers that have a budget of $4,000 to $5,000 for one switch fabric, we generally recommend NETGEAR. That is also a very good switch. If somebody wants something cheaper than that, we recommend they go for something else.

For a market like India, Africa, and Asia, people always think twice because Arista is expensive compared to the competition. Of course, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. There are no other products that you can directly compare with Arista. It's the difference between getting a V12 engine and a generic engine. You need to be able to afford a V12. Arista is not for everybody.

We have deployed many enterprise platform switches, depending on the customer's capacity to buy a given platform. We have tested the Huawei switches. For certain protocols and traffic, and especially for video transmissions, Huawei has a good platform. But it's not like Arista, which has the highest one. Cisco has a bit of delay and a lag. From a robustness perspective, you pay a premium for Arista but you get the most from it.

We don't recommend Cisco because Cisco is a very different ballgame altogether. It's more into infrastructure networking data management. Cisco is made for something very different. When you are talking about IoT, Cisco meets expectations.

I would recommend Arista for certain applications, for microbiological and molecular calculations; for supercomputing. If you are looking for an ultra-low latency network, this is the only solution. There is nothing else that is similar.

It has low-latency, stability, and scalability because it is modular. If you have the budget, go for it.

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.

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.

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.

It's our main platform. We centralize all network functionalities inside of our hospital network in two locations. From the data center to the distribution level.

In the past year, we have implemented this solution in two new hospitals. Arista is on the core and distribution layer, so our experience is approximately six core units and 36 lead switches of Arista and the pooling layer three overlays that they are providing.

We are using the most recent version, the release tracks had some overlap. Arista is suggesting a change to the release track.

Arista has been in our network since we started the new hospital building in August.

We are striving to exchange all existing hardware with Arista.

What we like most is its performance to price ratio. We also like the standard-based approach in contrast to other vendors in the network market, and the constant and timely support.

Some new features are needed.

Arista is technology-driven by themselves. At times they are limited by standards that are not formally closed. 

I would like to see more integration with one of the providers from each intent-based network for compliance documentation and IT security purposes. For future development of the product, being able to manage the security or relevant paths with intent-based networking is important. The intent-based network is a management that is on our security level.

The intent-based networking management, together with the provider of these solutions that are already free, would be beneficial.

I don't worry that there is a time gap between finalizing as triple E standards before integrating with the future release.

We have been using this solution for one year

This solution is stable, it is rock solid.

It is scalable up to a point where we don't have enough requirements so far.

For each location, we have approximately 30,000 clients, so approximately 60,000 total.

For the network, we are the IT solution provider for the hospital. The workgroup section has six staff members, but we will increase it to eight because we added more wireless capabilities and real-time location services.

In a hospital network, you have to sometimes support old systems. For instance, patient entertainment with an old fashioned multicast structure, they seem able to provide us with the proper solution within two days. 

They set up our environment back in California and they'll be able to provide us next Monday morning with a proper solution.

We would rate the technical support a ten out of ten. We can't complain and we are always surprised about the proficiency of the speed.

The initial setup is complex because our environment is complex. The hardware setup itself is quite straightforward.

We had implementation support by a gold partner here in Germany who are closely attached to Arista. We never ran into any issues where we had to go back to another point.

We are a publicly funded hospital in North Germany, so we are limited in what we would like to add to our infrastructure.

If you are looking for a future-proof solution, you just need to ask questions about the scalability and stability. You should do a proof of concept with Arista.

Get in contact with them to see how they solve problems. This is a beneficial experience. Even if somebody chooses another vendor, they should base a valid opinion about Arista.

I would strongly recommend this solution. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use three different models of the 7000 series switches to make up the network in one of our data centers. We use the 7060SX as an active leaf, the 7260 as a border leaf, and the 7500 series as the spines.

The most valuable feature is the Linux shell, which is useful for troubleshooting or capturing traffic. 

The documentation for this solution needs to be improved. In the documentation, it is not easy to find the exact solution which describes the configuration step by step. It means that we've had to ask our supplier how to use certain features, and which commands to use. We can find a simple description on the website, as well as a list of the features, but a more complete description is not available. It is not clear exactly how to configure and use each of the features. For other vendors, we can find the exact configuration, with examples, that we need to deploy for any new features.

The documentation did not explain that we could not vary the speed between ports that are in the same block. For example, we cannot have 1G and 10G on the neighboring ports. All four ports have to be 1G or 10G, which was very annoying for us when we realized that we needed to change the configuration and the cabling that we had already prepared.

In the next release of this solution, we would like the option to use two switches as one virtual switch.

The CVP management platform needs to be improved.

This solution is quite stable if the configuration is done according to the best practices. We found, however, that when we made some changes, we ran into problems.

These were temporary changes for test purposes. Nowhere was it explained that making these types of changes could lead to the problems that we observed, or that we would have any trouble. One such problem was that the utilization of links was very high because of an error in our test configuration.

Generally speaking, this is a very stable solution.

In our environment it is scalable. We can find the proper models to meet our requirements. I'm not sure how it would be in the case of very large networks, but in our data center there are a few hundred switches, so it is scalable.

We have thousands of users who use this network. This includes internal and external clients for our data center.

The technical support for this solution is quite good, but the deepness of the explanation in the documentation is not as good as I expect.

Most of the equipment that I have used is Cisco, although I have also used Juniper and Cumulus. For this new type of data center architecture, however, we did not use a solution prior to this one.

The initial setup of the individual switches is simple.

Using the Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) feature with the CloudVision Portal (CVP) is not simple, and it takes quite a long time.

Each of the switches can be deployed in about ten minutes, after several restarts, using the management interface. If I deploy using the command line then it will take a minute or two.

The CVP is supposed to be automated, but it is rather complicated and takes time.

For the initial deployment, we needed the help of our local supplier, the Arista representative. It was very helpful for us because we could not find good examples on the website. The best practices were descriptive from a very high-level view and did not contain detailed configuration examples.

I think that it would be very hard to prepare the whole configuration for the data center architecture without the help of our local supplier and Arista engineers.

This solution was my first experience with the new, modern data center architecture.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this series of switches is to carefully check the features that are supported on each model. Some new features are not supported on all platforms. I know that Arista still sells some old models that do not support the newest features.

This is a good solution, but the documentation needs to be improved. More detailed configuration examples are definitely needed.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.