Friday, May 24, 2019

Arista's Campus switching intentions?

What exactly is the intended use for Arista's campus line of switches? From what I've been able to find, 7300X3 and 7050X3 have been designated as the campus dedicated models. My question is whether these switches are designed to be used at the access layer, connecting workstations, printers, etc directly to these switches? Or rather are they intended to serve as top-of-rack switches, handling layer 3 routing, security etc.

My question stems from us shopping for new access layer switches for our campus network. Currently we're using a pair Cisco 3750x as our core layer 3 switches which handling all the routing and such. We plan to replace these sometime next year. Beneath those in the topology, we're using 8 HP Procurve Layer 2 switches for the access layer. These are all trunked off of the cisco pair we have and handle all of our workstation and printer connections. In the DataCenter we installed a pair of Arista 7050s back in the fall for our server infrastructure and they've been rock solid.

As I'm shopping for a replacement solution for our Procurves, I've been weighing Aruba 2930s or Juniper 3400s. My boss however was under the impression we would be converting fully to Arista. He thought we would use them even at the access layer in the Campus. He read an article about how they were making their way into campus switching and thought we should go with them to try to uniform our deployment. I told him it sounds like overkill but that I would research an Arista solution for the campus.

From what I've been able to determine, Arista is not intending to provide the access layer. I can't fathom spending $200,000 for 9 access switches. Is anyone able to break down and explain Arista's campus switching intentions for me?



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