Arista is continuing to grow it networking portfolio with its new Cognitive Cloud Networking strategy for enterprise campus environments that was announced on May 7.
Arista Cognitive Campus includes new switching platforms and a management plane for provisioning and management.
“Once again, we are disrupting the status quo to deliver a cognitive architecture with behavior-driven actions,” Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO for Arista Networks, stated.
Arista’s cognitive model comes as multiple other vendors, including Juniper and Cisco, push out their own intent-based networking approaches that aim to automate network functions and management.
The Cognitive Cloud model is being bolstered by Arista’s new 7300X3 and 7050X3 spline switches. The modular 7300X3 can scale up to 50 Tbps of performance with different linecard options. The 7050X3 fixed spline can be configured with 25G and 100G linecards to enable a cognitive campus network.
Switches alone aren’t enough to define intent, or as Arista calls it ‘cognitive management,’ which is where the Cognitive Management Plane (CMP) fits in. According to Arista, CMP integrates a state repository as well as a stream computation engine as part of a horizontally scalable cluster.
“Each cluster manages a subset of network devices from different vendors and interacts with other clusters through vendor-neutral APIs and standardized models, such as OpenConfig with gRPC,” Arista stated.
Financial Growth
The new cognitive platform follows a successful first quarter for Arista, which reported financial results on May 3.
For the first quarter of fiscal 2018, Arista reported revenue of $472.5 million for a 40.8 percent year-over-year gain. Net income grew to $144.5 million, up from $83.0 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2017.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
