Arista Cognitive Cloud Networking Redefines the Campus

Arista Networks announced an expansion of the cognitive campus portfolio with unified wired and wireless campus edge products designed to address transitional changes as the enterprise moves to an IoT (Internet of Things)-ready campus. Extending EOS and CloudVision, Arista’s Cognitive Cloud Networking approach brings operational consistency and modern cloud principles to the enterprise campus.

This approach, combined with key partnerships, helps reduce customer operational expenses through simplified architectures, data-driven analytics and segment-based security. With these wired and wireless edge additions, Arista now has a complete cognitive enterprise networking portfolio, spanning the data center, the cloud and the campus.

Arista’s Cognitive Campus for Simplicity and Cloud Principles

Today’s campus networks continue to suffer from too much complexity brought on by the myriad platforms, operating systems, proprietary features and network management tools from incumbent vendors. Coupled with the explosive growth of endpoints these challenges are not unlike those of legacy data centers, before the shift to cloud networking. The cloud networking principles of simplification, open-standards, software-driven control are just as applicable to today’s campus networks.

The Arista Cognitive Campus is a software-driven approach to unify wired and wireless campus access built on real-time, data-driven analytics that focus on delivering a great user and operator experience. The Arista Cognitive Campus leverages the Arista Universal Cloud Network (UCN) architecture developed for the world’s largest data centers. In 2018, Arista introduced the 7300X3 and 7050X3 as the Campus Spline™ and later the controller-less Cognitive WiFi product family. Arista CloudVision and the Cognitive Management Plane were also extended to include campus specific use-cases for wired and wireless.

Introducing the Cognitive Campus Edge

The Arista 720XP Series represents Arista’s first purpose-built campus leaf products and are a key addition bringing the wired edge component to Arista’s Cognitive Campus portfolio. With the 720XP, customers will benefit from improved security and visibility as they are able to gain a more holistic understanding of endpoint behaviors across users, mobile devices, and IoT platforms.

Unified Cognitive WiFi

These new campus leaf switches integrate directly with Arista’s Cognitive WiFi portfolio, including Arista’s first WiFi 6 access point. The new C-250 access point supports the full 802.11ax standard including 8×8 MU-MIMO, uplink OFDMA & MU-MIMO. Like other Arista enterprise access points, it also includes a 2×2 dual band 3rd radio. With target use cases for WiFi 6 such as higher bandwidth video, and many more simultaneous users, the 3rd radio will be essential. Along with a variety of other data sources, the 3rd radio provides a continuous stream of telemetry data into Arista’s Cognitive WiFi architecture where the power of cloud is harnessed to apply machine learning and cognitive intelligence.

CloudVision WiFi delivers real-time insight into the WiFi client journey, including the health of the network services, the user’s ability to connect, and delivering great WiFi experiences through analytics and proactive remediation. With CloudVision WiFi, Arista is delivering a modern and technologically advanced controller-less WiFi solution to customers.

Availability

The 720XP Series platforms, the C-250 WiFi 6 access point, and the associated cognitive EOS and CloudVision capabilities are in trials now with general availability in Q3’19.

Source: https://www.arista.com/en/company/news/press-release/7754-pr-20190606

Please contact your local Exclusive Networks Account Manager to learn more about the Arista Cognitive Campus and WiFi portfolio.