SCIENCE

Arista Networks has announced breakthrough network automation capabilities that simplify and accelerate the creation, migration and deployment of multi-tier network infrastructures. TheArista Zero Touch Provisioning capability empowers IT organizations to rapidly expand the capacity of a public or private cloud – adding thousands of servers and storage devices to the network in a matter of minutes.

Arista Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) fully automates the deployment of cloud networking capacity. With no human intervention, ZTP can completely configure the network to enable thousands of servers and storage devices to be added to the cloud in minutes. This automation capability builds on the Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS) architecture, an open and extensible modular operating system that delivers unparalleled stability and flexibility.

“Today’s rapidly expanding cloud computing environments are driving a new wave of innovation in the network,” stated Ken Duda, founder and vice president of software engineering at Arista Networks. “Today’s networking capabilities are measured not only by performance and scale, but also by programmability, APIs, and automation. Arista ZTP is the first in a series of automation capabilities we are bringing to the cloud network.”

Arista ZTP enables a switch to boot, identify the proper IP address for itself, upgrade its operating system version, add customer-specific or service provider-specific extensions, generate its own configuration, and add itself to the network. Combined with other EOS capabilities like Open Extensibility andVM Tracer the Arista switch can also securely connect back to a managed service provider and auto-provision all of its network segments to support virtual machines in a VMware vSphere private cloud.

"The network is one of the fundamental bottlenecks to scaling cloud computing systems and automation, open source software, and architectures designed for cloud scale have been historically absent from networking vendors," commented Randy Bias, CEO of Cloudscaling a leading cloud design company. "Arista's EOS and ZTP are exactly the types of valuable developments needed to scale the cloud."

Large IT networks require the ability to add thousands of servers and petabytes of storage capacity to the network in minutes to scale with demand. The network has historically been one of the biggest inhibitors of IT automation. Arista is leading a change with ZTP.

"Arista's Zero Touch Provisioning capabilities are helping lead the way to a new world of network automation and management that robust cloud computing platforms demand,” said Tom Sands, chief network engineer at Rackspace. "We are excited about Arista's support of the OpenStack open source cloud project, and how their ZTP technology could enable more powerful network automation services in the cloud."

Product Availability

Supported on Arista fixed switches, Zero Touch Provisioning capability is available in Q2’2011 as a software option.

Additional Information and Resources

A video demonstration of Arista Zero Touch Provisioning can be found at: 
http://www.aristanetworks.com/en/products/eos/ztp