Arista Warrior

Chapter 5. Arista Products

The Arista product portfolio can seem a little confusing at first because many of the switches look similar, but once you dig in you’ll realize why each model exists, and how you might use it in your own networks.

Remember, Arista switches are purpose built for the data center. You probably wouldn’t buy an Arista switch for a VoIP deployment that requires PoE. Though you could certainly use an Arista switch in your enterprise office environment, they don’t make a PoE model, the switches aren’t stackable, and Arista doesn’t really chase the office-switch market. These switches are made for data centers, and have features required for such deployments.

Every Arista switch has dual (or more) power supplies, hot swappable fans with front-to-back (or reverse) airflow, and a myriad of other features required for highly available data center environments. Let’s start with an overview of data center–specific features common to all Arista switches.

Power

All Arista switches support multiple, redundant power supplies as well as multiple fans, all of which are hot swappable. All of the top-of-rack switches have the fans and power supplies on the back of the switch, whereas the chassis-based switches have the power connectors on the front. An Arista 7050S-64 switch with the power supplies and fans removed is shown in Figure 5-1.

Note

The side of the switch with the network interfaces is the front.

I was pleasantly surprised when I unpacked my first Arista switch to see that ...