Arista Networks is adding new features to its campus networking portfolio to help enterprise customers more easily group and manage switches.
The new features – Switch Aggregation Group (SWAG) and CloudVision Leaf Spine Stack (LSS) Management – let customers group and manage individual switches via a single IP address and then collectively manage the logical switch stack within a networking closet or across the campus, said Kumar Srikantan, vice president and general manager of cloud fabric networking at Arista.
SWAG is implemented in the Extensible Operating System (EOS), Arista’s flagship network operating system that runs across its switch and router portfolio. In a nutshell SWAG, which will be available in the second quarter of 2025, lets customers group together up to 48 switches under a single logical IP address cluster.
There are three main benefits that stacking provides. The first is that it lets operators manage a group of switches as a single entity in their management platform, easing the ability to operate the network, said Sriram Venkiteswaran, director of product management at Arista. “The second is IP address conservation, because in a large, widely distributed global organization with a lot of branch locations, IP addresses can be a scarce resource,” Venkiteswaran said.
“Third, when customers are using third-party tools, such as SolarWinds for SNMP management, they are licensed via IP address. So, by exposing a single IP for a group of switches, customers can realize license cost savings,” Venkiteswaran said.
As for managing SWAG, Arista’s core CloudVision management package now supports the stacked switches.
CloudVision Leaf Spine Stack (LSS) Management implements a single and logical management plane to manage the stack without requiring the switches to be physically stacked.
Customers have the flexibility to perform network operations on a logical stack of switches in a standards-based, modern, leaf-spine architecture rather than being limited to legacy ring or chain topologies, Venkiteswaran said.
Many enterprises are still using a command line interface (CLI) for network management functions, such as onboarding and provisioning, and many enterprises rely on automation scripts that require them to log into a new CLI session for every switch, which is obviously tedious, Venkiteswaran said. With LSS, enterprises can provision, upgrade, configure, gather telemetry information, and segment all of the switches in a campus network once, simplifying operations, he said.
Stacking is a 30-year-old technology that’s used by most of Arista’s major competitors, including Cisco, Juniper, HPE Aruba and Dell – a fact Arista is quite aware of.
“We are filling out our campus networking menu and figured if you’re going to be the last one to do it, we might as well be the last word in deploying it,” Srikantan said.
“As client users, devices, and IoT continue to proliferate, the need for switching management and workload optimization across domains increases. Many sub-optimal and closed approaches have been designed in the past,” Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista, wrote in a blog about the news.
“Yet clearly, there are times when these switches need to be managed as one entity for customers to build and operate flexible designs and topology. In the 1990s, this was done with proprietary cabling hardware and closed stackable ring or chain topologies. This is a closed and cumbersome approach as the management scope is restricted to small numbers (less than 10) of switches and relies on proprietary mechanisms,” Ullal stated.
Arista’s modern software is designed with key availability and segmentation techniques that separate management and control planes, thus avoiding the pitfalls of proprietary stacking, Ullal stated.
“This simplified stacking approach improves operations, minimizes downtime, and reduces TCO—an advancement that has been a long time coming,” Ullal stated.
Source:: Network World