Arista Routing Solutions

Tue May 3 14:11:22 UTC 2016

> We're going to be getting some Arista gear soon and this issue came
> up. They made the same noises and vague overtures of "well, you
> *might* have problems with TAC if you go with 3rd party optics"...
> until I said "Oh really- well, that's a deal breaker, we can't really
> even consider that". And then they backpedaled at light speed and
> reassured me that 3rd party optics would be fine, they just "had to
> have the conversation".

Similar experience here, but the conversation went on far too long and ultimately lost Arista the deal. There was a ridiculous amount of insistence that we would have to carry a "stock of Arista optics", but every attempt to clarify exactly what that meant (how many, what they would cost etc) failed to get a straight answer.

It's 2016 and stupid conversations about vendor optics waste time and destroy deals.

The slight difference here is that pretty much the first thing we said to Arista was that transceivers were out of the question unless they could price them reasonably** (they chose not to). On this particular deal we were probably only talking about 500 SR 10G transceivers.

We've had similar conversations with Extreme, Brocade, Solarflare and Juniper, all of whom are quite happy with us running our own parts. Solarflare even certified our parts and put them on their website (http://solarflare.com/transceivers-and-cables).

> Also talked to a local Arista customer, much bigger than us and using
> a lot more of their gear. They have 0 Arista optics and 0 problems
> with 3rd party for a few years now. IMHO the whole thing was just
> sales guy FUD to try to squeeze a few extra bucks out.

Doesn't surprise me, and I'm sure if we'd pushed for another week we could have got to this position. Unfortunately for Arista, there was another vendor quite happy to get the deal done faster and without all the BS so we voted with our feet.

Clearly, mileage will vary on this one.

T

** in this context, "reasonably" means no more than _double_ what I currently buy at.