The last major application that Arista announced is the Smart System Upgrade. This application addresses a significant problem related to network device upgrades: swinging traffic away from the devices to be upgraded.
While networking vendors have touted features like in-service software upgrade (ISSU) as a way to make a network upgrade hitless, network engineers know from experience that it doesn't always work out. Therefore, most production environments will manually redirect traffic to devices not being upgraded to mitigate the risk of a traffic-impacting problem during the upgrade.
With Smart System Upgrade, Arista automates traffic redirection. In partnership with VMware and F5, the Arista application can take a snapshot of the production environment, put hosts into maintenance mode and manipulate virtual servers, effectively removing that section of the data center from the overall topology.
This allows the network device to be upgraded with no risk to traffic, as all traffic has been shifted. After the upgrade is complete, all hosts and virtual servers are restored to their previous state, using the snapshot to validate that all services were restored as expected. For any IT team that's gone through the laborious manual exercise of shifting load-balanced traffic and failing over to secondary paths to isolate a network device, Smart System Upgrade sounds like, well, a seven-layer awesome cake.
Arista is invested in network applications. It will partner with other vendors that make sense for its customer base. The company has 350 developers on staff to create network applications. And Arista is engaging the open source community as well, with its own site on GitHub.
In my opinion, this is what networking needs to start looking like. Give customers tools they can use--tools that solve real problems. Tools like this make IT operations faster and troubleshooting simpler.
The capabilities described above are some of the reasons that enterprises want to buy into SDN. SDN frameworks and APIs are nice, but they are merely enablers--not solutions--for the majority of customers. Customers need to solve problems. I believe Arista demonstrates a firm grasp of that notion.
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