Arista’s core EOS and CloudVision software, along with its 400G and 800G switches, are its mainstays in the competitive networking equipment market, which stands to gain as Ethernet adoption in AI networks picks up pace.
Arista has now set its sights on hitting the $10 billion mark with an ambitious strategy that will expand its product line to include routers, extend its markets to campus, WAN and cloud networking, and lean heavily into AI and machine learning.
The company has carved out a unique niche in the highly competitive networking market that is dominated by powerhouses like Cisco and Juniper. Those vendors offer soup-to-nuts portfolios of networking and security products and services. Arista has built its reputation on the speed and performance of its switches, as well as its software – specifically its Linux-based Extensible Operating System (EOS) and CloudVision management system – that enable customers to build and manage flexible, scalable, heterogeneous, software-defined networks.
“They position themselves for specific missions and verticals (banking and finance) rather than for the broad market, and that lets them focus on issues that are highly relevant without looking like they’re trying to build ‘god-boxes,'” said Tom Nolle, founder and principal analyst at Andover Intel.
Arista doesn’t pretend to make all the products an enterprise customer needs, Nolle said, which creates a bit of a conundrum. “That means they need to let competitors in, and those competitors make more of the infrastructure most users need than Arista does.” Nolle suggests that Arista should try to “expand their total addressable market.”
The company is well on its way to doing just that, with several major announcements in 2023 that add routing and security features to the product lineup and target growth areas like cloud networking, campus switching and generative AI.
Arista builds on core strengths
“We are a networking-first company founded on software principles of quality and reliability. That hasn’t changed over the years,” said Martin Hull, Arista’s vice president, cloud, platform product management and systems engineering.
A core strength for Arista is EOS, which was a radical departure for the industry when it was introduced. EOS utilized software programming – the beginnings of software-defined networks – to boost the customization, performance and control of network gear.
Today, EOS manages Arista switches and routers in all environments. “Cloud architectures built with Arista EOS scale to hundreds of thousands of compute and storage nodes, with management and provisioning capabilities that work at scale,” according to the company. “Through its programmability, EOS enables a set of software applications that deliver workflow automation, high availability, unprecedented network visibility and analytics, and rapid integration with a wide range of third-party applications for virtualization, management, automation and orchestration services.”
The ability to build and utilize a single operating system from the data center, across the campus, to the cloud is very attractive to enterprise users, and will continue to drive Arista in the future, experts say. On top of that, EOS can be deployed on white-box networking hardware, which gives customers options to avoid vendor lock-in.
Arista also supports open-source programming, and its boxes can run with the Linux-based Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC), which decouples network software from underlying hardware and can run on hundreds of switches and ASICs from multiple vendors.
“EOS is one of Arista’s greatest strengths because it offers a single image with flexible packaging options – unlike its major competitors who have multiple networking operating systems,” said Sameh Boujelbene, vice president of the Dell’Oro Group.
Another core strength for Arista is CloudVision, its centralized cloud-based management platform. CloudVision provides wired and wireless visibility, orchestration, provisioning, telemetry, automation and analytics across the data center, campus, and IoT devices on edge networks.
CloudVision provides a comprehensive view of the entire network, including all devices, connections, and traffic flows. This lets network analysts quickly identify and troubleshoot problems, as well as monitor performance and resource utilization, according to Arista. In addition, CloudVision’s network information can be shared by Arista networking partners such as VMware, Microsoft and others offering management options for customers.
The idea of a single package that can manage everything across the enterprise makes it a valuable tool for customers who use multiple products to handle management of multifaceted environments, Boujelbene said. “This also makes it well-suited for deploying and managing large, complex cloud networks,” Boujelbene said.
The cloud networking push
Arista is making a concerted effort to leverage EOS and CloudVision to support cloud networking, which offers connectivity and control between applications and workloads across clouds, cloud services, on-premises data centers, and edge networks.
“We believe that cloud computing represents a fundamental shift from traditional legacy network architectures,” Arista stated. “As organizations of all sizes have moved workloads to the cloud, spending on cloud and next-generation data centers has increased rapidly, while traditional legacy IT spending has grown more slowly. Our cloud networking platforms are well positioned to address the growing cloud networking market, and to address increasing performance requirements driven by the growing number of connected devices, as well as the need for constant connectivity and access to data and applications.”
The market for cloud networking solutions is highly competitive, but analysts give Arista high marks against its major rivals – Cisco, Juniper, and VMware.
“Arista offers a comprehensive cloud networking solution that differentiates itself from others with its ML-based troubleshooting capabilities,” according to a recent cloud networking report from GigaOm. “It also has a strong focus on network optimization and operations.”
According to GigaOm, CloudVision provides a consistent operational model across domains to simplify network operations with a single orchestration tool. Key features include the ability to enable multicloud path optimization using dynamic path selection, prioritizing production traffic over non-critical traffic, and control over networking policies.
“To achieve this optimization, CloudEOS instances auto-discover the available paths and automatically establish IPsec-based data plane encryption. For optimized forwarding and dynamic path selection (DPS), CloudEOS measures delay, latency, loss, and bandwidth for each potential path, and then applies this data in real-time to determine which path to use,” GigaOm stated.
Another key feature is that CloudEOS integrates with tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, and Chef, enabling users to declaratively provision and configure public cloud environments, GigaOm wrote.
The cloud networking market is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. The market for cloud-based IaaS networking will reach $19.4 billion globally in 2023, according to IDC, with a compound annual growth rate of 28% projected through 2026. Increasing cloud-native application architectures, distributed workloads, and their respective integration needs are the biggest drivers of IaaS cloud networking adoption, IDC stated.
Arista adds routing capabilities
Arista does face a number of challenges, including serious competition from larger and more established players, such as Cisco and Juniper. Beyond that, Arista has been very focused on its highly successful high-end markets, in particular service providers and hyperscalers that account for more than 50% of the vendor’s revenue.
But it doesn’t have a reputation for a wide breadth of products in areas such as security, SD-WAN and SASE compared to its competitors. However, that is changing. Arista now supports SD-WAN and SASE environments via recent enhancements to the Cloud EOS package, and its 7200 series switches are aimed at edge networking deployments.
Arista also this year rolled out WAN routing capabilities with new software, hardware and services, an enterprise-class system designed to link critical resources with core data-center and campus networks. That package, called the Arista WAN Routing System, ties together three components: enterprise-class routing hardware, software for its CloudVision management platform called Pathfinder, and the ability to establish neutral peering points called Transit Hubs. This enables customers to set up carrier-neutral and cloud-adjacent facilities to provide self-healing and path-optimization links across core, aggregation, and cloud networking interconnects.
Experts say the introduction of the WAN Routing package is significant because it represents Arista’s first official routing platform. In the past, Arista’s L2/3 data-center switches were deployed for routing use cases, but they were principally data center switches. Now, Arista is expressly targeting an expansive range of routing use cases with an unambiguous routing platform that specifically addresses the SD-WAN functionality gap in the Arista portfolio.
