Arista bundles edge networking gear for small enterprises

Arista will soon roll out a  cloud-based package of edge networking and security services for small to medium sized businesses that have limited IT management resources.

Arista’s Cognitive Unified Edge (CUE) service is a turnkey package of new and existing Arista network and security gear that can be installed on a customer site and be controlled via a single dashboard on by the company’s core CloudVision management platform. 

CloudVision provides wired and wireless visibility, automation, orchestration, provisioning, telemetry, and analytics across the data center, campus, and IoT devices on edge networks. CloudVision’s network information can be utilized by Arista networking partners such as VMware and Microsoft.

“With CUE we are not targeting the typical Arista customer who has a big data center and a large IT staff and devops, rather we are targeting the customer that’s looking for something much more turnkey, much more integrated,” said  Jeff Raymond, vice president of Arista  EOS Software and Services.  “These customers either don’t have a full IT staff or if they do they wear many different tasks, not just networking. And so they’re looking for something that simple to deploy and simple to operate and is tightly integrated.”

Aside from the CloudVision, CUE can include a number of new Arista networking components as needed. For example, a new family of firewalls—Edge Threat Management Q Series—can be ordered with CUE.  The Q series comes in six flavors and supports redundant power supplies, PoE, NVME SSD storage, and LTE backup.

“The firewalls include all manner of security features including intrusion prevention, virus blocking and threat prevention all designed to be deployed typically in a small or branch office,” said Heather Paunet Director of Commercial Marketing with Arista.

The firewall provides reports allowing an administrator to drill down into exactly what’s happened on the network over any time period. It comes with over 200 standard reports that can be customized and pinned to appropriate dashboards, Paunet  said.

A new small switch can also be included in CUE.  The 1RU Arista 710P Compact Switch features 12 or 16 ports that can be configured to support a variety of 10/100/1000BASE-T or 1/10 GbE connectivity. The  710 runs EOS, Arista’s standard operating system.

A range of existing Arista WiFi 5/6 and 6E indoor and outdoor access points is also available with CUE.

Arista envisions three uses cases for CUE—very small single sites with 25-100 employees, distributed branch offices with about 500 workers, and larger distributed cloud environments.  

Arista CUE will be available from Arista channel and commercial channel partners in Q2, with early availability in April.