Next Generation Cognitive Networking

Just a decade ago, public cloud titans Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure Cloud, became synonymous with elastic scaling, and software provisioning through APIs. This was a phenomenon that didn’t exist within closed legacy systems.

Private clouds, by contrast, saw the relevance of enterprise customers recreating an infrastructure based on public cloud principles operating at a smaller scale. In an ideal world, both clouds would allow application developers to create and choose where to deploy applications without trade-offs. Arista pioneered technology development in this cloud networking category and today with Covid-19 restrictions driving millions of users to work-from-home, there are tremendous pressures on network access and bandwidth.

The Next Frontier - Cognitive Campus

CIOs now need cloud strategies not only for public workloads but also across security applications and campus decisions. Diversity in applications and infrastructure makes a single operating model and framework across a broad array of non-aligned applications difficult. Arista’s Cognitive Campus redefines the new access leaf, for wired and wireless, delivering zero touch provisioning, analytics, deep cognition and security through cloud principles.

Applications Drive Campus networking

Cloud native applications tend to be extremely high performance and cost effective in a public cloud and are designed to linearly scale up and down with changes in the load. At the same time new lifestyle and work restrictions have led to unprecedented use of SAAS applications like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, pushing network capacity to its limits.

But wait!  What about the Campus Network?

The 2020 campus networking domain has migrated to the open flat leaf/spine network architectures providing customers a ‘high radix’ model instead of legacy three tiered models. The second advancement is ease of operations and day zero deployment of zero touch provisioning (think of this as campus wide ZTP) operations and change control across wired/wireless, applications and diverse clients.

Cognitive Wifi for Google Hangouts, Zoom and Microsoft Teams:

Arista’s Cognitive WiFi is a fitting example of this trend towards cognition and ease of network operations. It delivers state of the art application dashboard performance to measure quality of experience for Google Hangouts, Zoom and Microsoft Teams applications, in addition to existing collaboration tools. Now administrators can direct the inference intelligence towards solving client specific problems as well as support for OpenConfig models with Arista being among the first to support zero touch deployment of access points without manual operation.

Undoubtedly, by adopting the cloud principles of availability, agility, automation and analytics we deliver the rich capabilities for the campus 2020 era. Welcome to the new world of software driven networking! Feel free to give us your views at feedback@arista.com. Be safe and healthy!

Reference:

Cognitive WiFi Press Release

Cognitive Campus White Paper

WiFi Webinar

Campus Builder Webinars

Zoom and Arista Video