Arista adds intelligent switch stacking, management for campus networks

CloudVision Leaf Spine Stack (LSS) Management implements a single and logical management plane to manage the stack without requiring the switches to be physically stacked.

Customers have the flexibility to perform network operations on a logical stack of switches in a standards-based, modern, leaf-spine architecture rather than being limited to legacy ring or chain topologies, Venkiteswaran said.

Many enterprises are still using a command line interface (CLI) for network management functions, such as onboarding and provisioning, and many enterprises rely on automation scripts that require them to log into a new CLI session for every switch, which is obviously tedious, Venkiteswaran said. With LSS, enterprises can provision, upgrade, configure, gather telemetry information, and segment all of the switches in a campus network once, simplifying operations, he said.

Stacking is a 30-year-old technology that’s used by most of Arista’s major competitors, including Cisco, Juniper, HPE Aruba and Dell – a fact Arista is quite aware of.

“We are filling out our campus networking menu and figured if you’re going to be the last one to do it, we might as well be the last word in deploying it,” Srikantan said. 

“As client users, devices, and IoT continue to proliferate, the need for switching management and workload optimization across domains increases. Many sub-optimal and closed approaches have been designed in the past,” Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista, wrote in a blog about the news.