Arista launches network automation as a service with CloudVision

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) today announced a new enterprise-grade Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering for the flagship CloudVision^® platform. Arista’s new CloudVision as-a-Service product is now available as a fully managed software service that automates multi-domain networks spanning across the client to cloud to help customers achieve faster time-to-value, elastic scaling, and continuous network assurance.

“With CloudVision cognitive NetDB, we extended our unique state-sharing architecture from individual switches into the cloud, creating a unified network data platform. On top of this platform, we built CloudVision as a SaaS-based product, the next step towards network reliability with advanced network assurance services,” said Ken Duda, Founder, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Software Engineering at Arista, “We believe that Introduction of CloudVision as a SaaS platform will help more customers adopt more modern operational practices with reduced overall operational complexity.”

CloudVision as-a-Service is a natural evolution of the existing CloudVision on-premises solution and supports the same consistency of features across both deployment models. This allows a common experience for customers choosing either deployment model.

Cloud-based Customer Experience

Legacy enterprise network management has required on-premises deployments using servers and appliances which require continuous upgrading and maintenance, have fixed capacity, and allow limited data sharing. With CloudVision as-a-Service, enterprise customers are now able to use a single cloud-based service for enterprise-wide network automation, telemetry and analytics across all of their network infrastructure, delivering a secure multi-tenant cloud experience, consistent across the enterprise network, and providing key attributes:

·       SaaS-based onboarding and Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) as a service: Continuous network upgrades and transitions are dramatically simplified and virtually hands-free, assuring access to the latest CloudVision and device features on a real-time basis – thus removing the burden of tracking complex updates and speeding up time-to-value.

·       Elastic scale and performance: Based on CloudVision’s existing cloud-native Kubernetes cluster architecture, leveraging Arista’s cognitive NetDB with its data distributed across global cloud regions and availability zones – to provide flexible performance, capacity, and scale.

·       Continuous network assurance: CloudVision’s inherent AI/ML-based analytics engines providing insights derived from anonymized customer data and delivered as a connected support experience – to help customers proactively detect and prevent issues.

Architected with Cloud Principles

By delivering a CloudVision as a cloud-based high-performance service, based on CloudVision’s existing scale-out cluster architecture, customers can now have a unified and automated deployment, provisioning, and maintenance experience with no onsite resources to set up and manage the management application. Further, Arista provides all the ongoing maintenance and tuning of the service, delivers data encryption that is always on, provides proactive security patching, and enables elastic scaling, automated backup, failover, and recovery so that customers no longer need to worry about the reliability, performance, and security of their management software infrastructure.

For safe and secure operation, CloudVision as-a-Service provides continuous protection of customer’s data with encryption of all data-at-rest and data-in-transit, data-set anonymization, secure operational practices, and strong authentication and access controls that integrate with customer’s existing security policies and compliance requirements. Multi-region deployments of the service ensure that customer’s performance, manageability, and availability SLAs can be met regardless of variations in their workloads or the scale of their deployments.

Powered AI and ML Enabled Engines

In CloudVision as-a-Service, AI and machine learning techniques are embedded into Arista’s cognitive NetDB (state-driven network-wide database) can provide on-demand elastic compute and storage capacity, at scale, for more efficient resource allocation and to deliver more compute-intensive analytics as needed. Further, with global access to aggregated and anonymized customer data-sets, CloudVision analytics engines can provide Arista with better insights across customers – allowing for more precise and timely support recommendations, thus strengthening network assurance as a value-added service for all Arista customers.

Seamless Client to Cloud Access Overcomes Traditional Silos

As part of Arista’s cognitive management plane framework, CloudVision provides a consistent management plane across data center, campus (wired and wireless), and public cloud use-cases, simplifying network operations by breaking down the traditional network management silos. With CloudVision as-a-Service, customers can easily ensure that every part of their infrastructure – major data centers, wiring closets, and cloud application platforms – is quickly deployable, highly reliable, positively secured, and primed to drive cost savings and growth as their requirements expand. Use-case benefits span across client to campus to data center to cloud including:

·       In the data center, CloudVision as-a-Service provides an extension to the customer's software-driven automation approach, without requiring on-site resources to set up and manage the data center network management platform, and it provides a value-added upgrade for existing CloudVision customers while supporting the same familiar features and APIs.

·       On the campus, customers transitioning outdated wiring closets will experience simplified wiring closet deployments and a common integrated wired and wireless network deployment experience with enhanced support and easier troubleshooting.

·       Across multiple public clouds, customers will have the autonomic tenant and site provisioning service that is consistent with the cloud operational model – providing unified provisioning for all software-defined cloud network infrastructure.

New CloudVision 2020 Functionality

In addition to the introduction of the cloud service delivery, the new CloudVision 2020 releases introduce many new enhancements, including optimizing network-wide upgrades with new change control enhancements, managing risk through compliance improvements, reducing mean-time-to-resolution with new visibility features, and expanding deployment applicability with scale and multi-cloud features.

Availability

The CloudVision as-a-Service is in production for limited customers now and will be generally available for all customers in Q3 2020. The new CloudVision functionality is now shipping in the 2020 series of releases.