Arista Routing Solutions

Timothy Creswick Timothy.Creswick at vorboss.com
Thu Apr 28 19:22:36 UTC 2016


> Just wanted to interject, the port density of the Arista switches is quite
> impressive, especially considering the price point they're at.

Not in response to any point specifically, but the major issue which stopped us buying Arista a few months ago was the rather out-dated attitude to 3rd party transceiver support.

I'm sure there are plenty of people running Arista on 3rd party optics, but all the noises that were being made by the sales and technical guys suggested that we could find ourselves abandoned by their support or a policy change in the future. 

I don't fundamentally have an issue with vendor optics, except when they are excessively priced. One or two vendors will actually sell their 10Gbps optics at a price that's pretty hard to refuse, given that it's all supported. The same couldn't be said in this case.

Additionally, the insistence that we would have to buy a "small number" of Arista optics with each device for testing purposes gets old very quickly. Again, I could get on-board with this if it's just for troubleshooting, but not when these additional optics suddenly add 15% to the overall buy price of each switch. At that point, other vendors are firmly back on the table.

YMMV of course, I suspect especially if you're buying 100s of boxes.

T


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