Arista Routing Solutions

Thu Apr 21 08:46:09 UTC 2016

Hey Colton,

Comments inline:

On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 3:37 PM, Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com>
wrote:

> NANOG,
>
> I know Arista is typically a switch manufacturer, but with their recently
> announced Arista 7500R Series and soon to be announced but already shipping
> 7280R Series Arista is officially getting into the routing game. The fixed
> 1U 7280R Series looks quite impressive. The 7500R series is your
> traditional chassis and line card based solution.
>

I must admit, i'm not usually excited by new hardware, but this
announcement did catch my eye!

Both of these products have the ability to hold the full internet routing
> table, and Arista is working on MPLS features. Both of these new products
> use the latest Broadcom Jerico chipsets.
>
> I would like to know how viable of a product NANOG thinks these Arista
> routers are compared to service provider grade routers from Cisco, Juniper,
> ALU, and Brocade?
>

Honestly? I think you need to look at what you actually need out of a box.
At the end of the day, its a 1U switch. If you want to terminate a GRT a
the edge of your network and do some basic path selection then it sounds
like it would be an amazing and cheap fit. On the other hand, I don't think
we can start throwing away core routers yet ;)

Cost wise, Arista seems to be much, much less per port. For example, the
> 1U Arista 7280R with 48x10GbE (SFP+) & 6x100GbE QSFP cost about the same as
> what Juniper sells a MX104 with only four 10G ports for (Under 20K).
>

I'm consistently amazed at the density they are achieving for the $$ and I
think it all comes down to what the actual application is here. Most basic
BGP networks do not need all the bells and whistles of the MX104 and will
really benefit from the extra port density. That being said, I wouldn't be
replacing core PoPs in large ISPs with 1U switches!

> Can the Arista EOS software combine with their hardware based on the
> Broadcom Jericho chipset truly compete  with the custom chipsets and
> accompanying software from the big guys?
>

I've used Arista for a while now (Moving from Cisco / Extreme) and I truly
believe that their software is excellent. They just seem to be doing it
'the right way', If you've not watched it, this video is worth a bit of
your time! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdJZq4dRjf4

Thats my $0.02 anyway

Tom