[a-nsp] welcome

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

On Sun, Sep 02, 2018 at 09:34:31PM +0000, Gustav Ulander wrote:
> I am a bit curious, I think that most of us that are looking at Arista at some point come from either Cisco or Juniper land? Why did you choose to look at Arista and what other manufacturers are you looking at? 
> For us we are looking at improving our TCO so we are evaluating both hw and any staff training as a hole and as a consequence we are looking at a number of manufacturers. 

We're originally a Cisco shop.

For L2 switches, we've moved to Juniper some 3 years ago, due to much
better price/performance ratio, and due to Cisco being so confused about
their product portfolio (which hasn't improved since then).

We're looking at Arista for a replacement for the "datacenter routing and
interconnect" stuff which is "Cat 6500 with SVI, STP and EoMPLS" today
- replacing STP redundancy by MLAG works really nice with the Aristas,
and connecting L2 clouds over VXLAN is also a success story.  What we're
somewhat unhappy so far is SVI routing, because the Trident boxes do not
provide packet/byte counters for SVI (ingress, yes, egress, no, so in
case of "someone here is receiving 10G of packet love" we can see "it
goes towards the cloud customers", but not "which routed vlan?").

QFX5k would do this job, but we've been somewhat underwhelmed with Juniper
software quality...


Also, we have 6500/sup720s that still carry "mostly full BGP tables"
and need to be replaced with something that needs less energy, has
more 10G ports.  The Jericho boxes look like they would nicely fit
that niche, for a reasonable price point.


Some thinsg why we like Arista...

 - the CLI is "like Cisco, just better" (many nice small improvements,
   but if your engineers know Cisco, they will feel at home very quickly)

 - they are focusing on "build proper products on merchant silicon", instead
   of "we have our own silicion, and our other own silicon, and yet another
   product family, *and* we add low-end devices based in Broadcom silicion,
   but we do not provide all features there, and you never know which
   platform will be discontinued next month" like a certain other vendor
   that has too many different products, most of them with "IOS like CLI"...

 - their TAC seems to be really really good.  When POC testing the T2+
   series, we found an IPv6 related bug (of course, we always do :) ) -
   and the engineer was genuinely interested, could reproduce the issue
   in the lab in like 2h, we had a bug ID in like 6h, and it was fixed
   in the next EOS release.  Rumors say they do this to impress new 
   customers :-) - but supposedly TAC is really that good, even after
   you have bought the stuff.

 - the RPC API is really nice - easy to program on the client side, 
   and useful feedback from the device (we use this to roll out
   config snippets)

 - proper rapid per-vlan STP for these areas where we cannot do without 
   - $J will do VST, but not rapid per-vlan...


What we do not like so far

 - product policy - like, T2+ boxes not getting MPLS P support, which
   will create annoyance and special cases in our mixed IP/IPv6/MPLS 
   network.  There is still lots of EoMPLS and a bit of L3 VPN over MPLS
   going on, and if we replace a 6500 doing MPLS P by an Arista box,
   it better should do MPLS P...  since the hardware can do it, it's
   just "market politics" - "go buy a Jericho box!"

 - SVI counters on T2+ - we have a feature request open on this, but 
   it should not be "something to ask for" but "something that we 
   took for granted in a router-thingie sold in 2018" (everything 
   our old 6500s can do is "technology from last century"!)

gert

-- 
"If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you 
 feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted 
 it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor."
                             Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert at greenie.muc.de
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