Introducing the Arista WAN Routing System and CloudVision Pathfinder

Introducing the Arista WAN Routing System and CloudVision Pathfinder

When we released our Cognitive Campus products our strong client interest reaffirmed our design decision to use Arista EOS, our Network Data Lake (NetDL), and our CloudVision management platform as the foundation for our expansion into a new network transport domain. We applied the same principles as we organically designed and engineered our WAN Routing System:

• Arista EOS - the same image, the same quality, the same testing discipline, the same operational modes - now across the routed WAN

• Arista CloudVision - orchestration, provisioning, management, and time-series telemetry. Now augmented with WAN-specific capabilities for traffic engineering, IP path computation, and application awareness

• Arista WAN Routing Platforms - enterprise-class routing systems designed for critical sites, aggregation, core networks, and campus network interconnections

• Arista CloudEOS - extending EOS deployments to the cloud edge and for carrier-neutral transit hubs deployed in densely peered and highly reliable sites like Equinix and available through Platform Equinix

Three Key Features: Arista WAN Routing System

Dual Modality Design - we recognize that there are technical, architectural and market requirements for traditional federated routing protocols building both public and private networks. At the same time, there are equivalent requirements for systems that can have their configurations procedurally rendered, tested, and automatically deployed. We designed our new systems to operate in both a classic and stand-alone routing model or in a more ‘SD-WAN’ model.

Adaptive Virtual Topologies - defined and executed within EOS and provisioned and traffic engineered automatically in conjunction with CloudVision Pathfinder are AVTs: Adaptive Virtual Topologies. An AVT is a logical abstraction within the Arista Routed WAN Architecture that combines:

• Real-time dynamic path selection and path-wise self-healing for structured topology definitions

• Automated topology construction and peering that also establishes a cryptographically secured topology

• Classifying applications, interfaces, subinterfaces, and 5-tuple matched traffic into a specific open-standard identifier and associated tenant-ID

• Automated traffic engineering of the AVT across the dynamic paths based on the current network state, application requirements, prioritization, and business logic

IP Core and Aggregation Path Computation - a constant question we heard from network operators over the past decade was,

“How can SD-WAN self-heal when there is a service disruption from a branch to the aggregation site, and yet multi-million-dollar routers in our core will forward traffic over a link experiencing 30% packet loss and never report an error?”

We took this feedback and client need to heart and developed an IP-based path computation capability into CloudVision Pathfinder that enables self-healing, dynamic pathing, and traffic engineering not only for critical sites back to aggregation systems but also between the core, aggregation, cloud, and transit hub environments.

Interesting Use Cases

We are seeing a myriad of use cases within our clients - from AutoVPN requirements scaling out site-to-site IPsec cryptographically assured tunnels to Internet Peering routers with very large tables and numbers of peer connections to EVPN Route Servers/Reflectors deployed on systems with extremely scalable control planes supporting over ten million routes.

One use-case we are very excited about, that is generally available and in production deployments today at several forward-looking clients is our Transit Hub implementation which was developed with Equinix. In this deployment we are replacing traditional aggregation routers with scalable routing systems deployed within Equinix’s global carrier-neutral and cloud-adjacent Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers. By geographically distributing Transit Hubs and coupled with the CV Pathfinder Path Computation Engine clients are able to take advantage of using all of the Internet peering links available through Equinix Fabric™ but also their high-scale cloud onramps to be able to utilize the public cloud providers backbones as viable transit offerings on demand.

Innovation

Innovation is a constant at Arista, we’re continuing to develop products, technologies, and architectures that transform the networking experience for engineers and operators. We’ve been listening to our customers for almost fifteen years asking for an alternative that can provide an end-to-end solution with a consistent network O/S, reliable software, modern network engineering architectures, and a modern operating model. Our innovation journey will never be complete, but we are delighted to share these new capabilities with you.