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Arista will charge a premium for CloudVision as a service
Arista's CloudVision as a service will have a higher subscription price than the on-premises version. The vendor says the new product will have better network analytics.
By the end of September, Arista Networks customers using its on-premises network management software for the data center and campus can switch to a cloud-based version with a higher subscription price.
Arista introduced this week CloudVision as a service, which is being tested by select customers. The new product will have the same capabilities of the on-premises version but without the hassle of securing the software and installing updates. It also eliminates all chores related to managing the in-house server that runs the application.
The reduction in tasks associated with the on-premises version is why Arista will charge a "slight premium" for CloudVision as a service, said Jeff Raymond, a product manager at Arista. The company will sell the service through the same subscription model used for the on-premises software, but the additional cost for the cloud version would depend on the customer's network architecture.
Companies using on-premises CloudVision can migrate to the cloud version easily because the features sets are the same, Raymond said. A customer would duplicate its network configuration and provisioning model in the cloud, and then start network telemetry streaming.
Arista lets customers stream data to the cloud and the on-premises software to ensure that everything is working on CloudVision as a service before dropping the in-house version.
"There are no expensive professional services required necessarily for that migration," Raymond said.
Arista plans to provide better analytics through the cloud because it will have access to all customer telemetry. The company intends to utilize customers' anonymized data to gain more insight into network operations. The additional information should help Arista provide companies with more effective recommendations to fix problems.
CloudVision -- on premises and in the cloud -- uses an Arista-built central repository, called NetDB, for storing real-time event data from the company's switches. Arista's analytics engine presents network insights through a visual format. Security partners also use Arista-gathered data to look for events that indicate a possible vulnerability or exploit.
Arista catches up with Cisco, HPE, Juniper
CloudVision as a service brings Arista on par with the cloud-based software Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks offer customers for their campus networks. But Arista's cloud product also fully manages network operations in the data center.
"Where Arista will see the greatest return on those capabilities is within its installed base," said Brad Casemore, an analyst at IDC. "Enterprise data center customers will be able to extend CloudVision and CloudVision as a service to campus scenarios."
Arista is a relative newbie in campus networking. In 2018, the company introduced its first switches for that environment and acquired Wi-Fi infrastructure vendor Mojo Networks.
With the introduction of CloudVision as a service, Arista updated the on-premises product with improved visualizations of packet flow on a company's Arista-powered network topology. The latest version will find the path and provide an overlay of metrics, such as buffer utilization, errors and microbursts.
Also, Arista has added predictive analytics to CloudVision that can spot potential problems based on the latency of packets flowing to applications. The algorithms spot trouble based on deviations from the time it should take data packets to reach their destination.
Arista plans to ship another refresh of CloudVision in the fourth quarter.
