Delivering cloud principles for the enterprise

Arista Networks has introduced CloudVision^® 2019, building upon Arista’s cognitive management plane. The CloudVision 2019 release brings new capabilities and integrations, helping customers with operational cost reduction, risk management, and agility in network operations.

CloudVision is a modern software platform designed to bring cloud network operations to enterprise customers through a network-wide suite of automation, telemetry, and analytics. As part of Arista’s cognitive management plane framework, CloudVision is a consistent management plane across data center, campus wired and wireless, and public cloud use-cases, simplifying network operations by breaking down the traditional network management silos.

“Arista has helped Ramsay Health Care to reduce operational costs through faster mean-time-to-root cause. The Arista CloudVision platform has become the source of truth for our network infrastructure and is a critical part of the network operations at Ramsay Health Care,” said John Sutherland, CIO, Ramsay Health Care.

Architected for Places-In-the-Cloud

Network operators are striving to improve operations in areas such as proactive analytics, automated change controls, and continuous compliance assessment. However, legacy operational models and brittle management tools have historically left network operations with limited polling-based visibility and unreliable device control.

Arista has helped the largest cloud providers drive advancements in telemetry and automated network operations that improve many of these same network operations tasks. The principles on which these large clouds operate can be applicable to the broader network operations groups, as well.

Arista’s CloudVision platform is designed to harness the best-practices of the software-driven operations of these large cloud operators while delivered as a turnkey product for a streamlined path towards network automation.

Built from the ground-up on a foundational NetDB architecture, Arista CloudVision is a dramatic improvement over legacy polling-based network management. All network elements - physical, virtual, cloud, and containerized - stream real-time telemetric data back to CloudVision’s big data repository, which creates a time-series digital replica of the network that enables administrators to view the state of the network at any point in time. CloudVision’s analytics engines then churn through the data sets, providing insights that convert day-to-day operational tasks from reactive to proactive.

As a centralized management plane, CloudVision can orchestrate operations of a single, coherent, and elastic pool of virtual and physical network resources. This capability normalizes the operating model for network troubleshooting, scale, elastic expansion and contraction across the enterprise, giving the network agility to adjust to the business needs.

Key Capabilities in CloudVision 2019

CloudVision has delivered a wealth of advanced capabilities such as centralized provisioning, end-to-end time-series visibility, network-wide topology views, compliance reporting, and analytic-driven event notifications across wired and wireless networks already in the hands of Arista customers. CloudVision 2019 builds on these capabilities with exciting enhancements to this platform, including the following highlights:

●        Hitless change controls, including customizable workflows to orchestrate task scheduling, modal awareness, and live change control monitoring

●        Data plane visibility, including the ability to consume flow-data from sFlow and IPFIX

●        Device Analyzer, providing endpoint inventory and behavioral analysis for all connected devices and helping to proactively identify security threat vectors

●        New topology overlay views, including network events and segmentation mappings

●        Network-wide Search, for tracking down key items across the historical time-series

●        Customizable rules engine, for creating customer-specific network compliance rules and associated events

Open Third-Party Support

CloudVision has primarily relied on the strong API suite provided by Arista EOS^®. These transactional APIs provide complete and reliable communication with the device under management, ultimately improving the operation of the management plane. 

CloudVision 2019 allows expanded device visibility, including native OpenConfig support. This capability brings network visibility of third-party devices that support OpenConfig into CloudVision. In addition, CloudVision 2019 supports a new Device SDK for visibility into legacy platforms that do not support OpenConfig. Using this SDK, CloudVision can pull visibility metrics from SNMP-capable platforms, including routers, switches, firewalls, etc., and bring that into the CloudVision apps. This capability allows CloudVision to present a broader and more complete view of the network components.

CloudVision Integration with Red Hat Ansible Automation

The latest ecosystem integrations are possible via collaboration with Red Hat Ansible Automation. Building on existing certified CloudVision Ansible Modules and forthcoming certified Ansible Collections, Ansible Playbooks used for a variety of DevOps integration scenarios are now available. CloudVision can both provide control of the Arista estate while still leveraging the broader Ansible framework for multi-vendor configuration and image management.

“Red Hat Ansible Automation is one of the leading DevOps platforms for infrastructure automation. When combined with Arista’s leadership in programmable network software, we are able to bring more agility to network operations and improve efficiency for our joint customers,” said Peter Sprygada, Distinguished Engineer, Ansible, Red Hat.