Arista Networks

Software Defined Cloud Networking
 
Solutions Guide

Introduction
The rapid adoption of virtualization technologies are driving server consolidation, data center optimization and application mobility. IT organizations are adopting new data center architectures, either in house, or with managed cloud Service Providers. These virtualized data center architectures offer unprecedented assetutilization, with lights out provisioning and automation. Both Enterprise and Service Provider IT organizations need to deploy new network designs capable of massive scale that can accommodate these highly dynamic virtualized workloads and resultant network traffic demands while minimizing complexity and cost. For many, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is being viewed as the technology advancementto address this new paradigm in data center networking design. SDN promises a shift from distributed intelligence, to centralized intelligence, and from proprietary based architectures to Open Source, including standards based switching and routing solutions. The value propositions of SDN run the gamut including reduced cost of ownership, greater configuration automation, more intelligent end userservices, to lower operation costs. SDN is still an emerging collection of technologies and as the standards that SDN encompasses reach maturity, and hype meets reality, the implementations will be different from the initial concepts. Already, there are several open source software stacks including OpenStack, OpenFlow, and open virtual switch (Open vSwitch/OVS). And there are different tunneling,flow and controller technologies that are coming to market. Further, several companies, are discussing the migration of traditional network management tools to centralized controller architectures. For many network designers, managers, and administrators the variety of SDN architectures can be overwhelming. Ultimately SDN deployments will be evolutionary, as customers cannot afford to rip outexisting infrastructures. In many cases multiple SDN architectures may be deployed within an IT organization to deliver the requirements for scale and operational efficiencies. In other cases SDN architectures may be deployed for failover, application mobility, and capacity management. Selecting a network architecture that can support multiple SDN models ensures IT professionals the flexibility tomeet today and tomorrow’s business requirements whether they are for Enterprise or Service provide deployments. SDN can be achieved via standard APIs that several hardware and software architectures intend to support.

Arista’s Software Defined Cloud Networking (SDCN) Pillars:
Arista Networks fundamentally believes in many of the core SDN concepts- scalability, operational efficiency, andapplication mobility. Within the Data Center the most pervasive use case for SDN technologies are cloud related, and as a result Arista refers to SDN as Software Defined Cloud Networking (SDCN). The addition of the word cloud by Arista places the SDN focus on networking virtualization, application mobility, and automated service enablement. Arista is proactively working with other leaders in the SDNspace, co-authoring the NV-GRE standard with Microsoft, the VXLAN standard with VmWare and working with the OpenStack, OpenFlow and the Open vSwitch communities. The pillars of Arista’s Software Defined Cloud Networking Vision are: Pillar 1: Advanced Multi-path Cloud Topology: Scaling Cloud networking across multiple chassis via MLAG (Multi-chassis Link Aggregation Groups) at L2 or ECMP (Equal CostMulti-Pathing) at L3 is a standards-based and scalable approach for uncompromised cloud networking. This insures effective use of all available bandwidth in a non-blocking mode, while providing failover and resiliency when any individual platform or link has an outage www.aristanetworks.com 1

Software Defined Cloud Networking
 
Solutions Guide condition. MLAG and ECMP comprehensively cover...