Arista refreshes CloudVision software and integrates with Red Hat's Ansible

On Tuesday, Arista Networks announced new capabilities and integrations on its CloudVision 2019 software platform to help organizations reduce their operational costs.

CloudVision is a turnkey solution for network-wide workload orchestration and workflow automation. It was designed to work with software-defined network (SDN) controller solutions that orchestrate virtual network overlays by focusing on workflow visibility, automation tasks, and initial or ongoing network provisioning across the underlying physical network.

As a centralized management plane, CloudVision can orchestrate operations of a single, coherent, and elastic pool of both virtual and physical network resources.

Using Arista's cognitive management plane framework, CloudVision can provide consistent management across data centers, campus wired and wireless networks and public use cases. It breaks down traditional network management silos by simplifying network operations when compared to traditional polling-based network management solutions.

This year's release of CloudVision expands device and network visibility, including native OpenConfig support across third party devices. CloudVision 2019 also supports a new device software development kit (SDK) that provides visibility into legacy platforms that aren't supported by OpenConfig.

With the SDK, CloudVision can pull visibility metrics from SNMP-capable platforms, including routers, switches and firewalls, and bring those into the CloudVision apps, which enables CloudVision to present a more complete view of the network components.

With CloudVision, all of the network elements—including physical, virtual, cloud, and containerized—stream real-time telemetric data back to CloudVision’s big data repository. With that data, CloudVision can create a digital replica of the network that allows IT administrators to view the state of the network at any point in time. CloudVision’s analytics engines then sifts through the data sets, providing insights that convert day-to-day operational tasks from reactive to proactive.

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Along with the software updates, Arista also announced deeper integrations with Red Hat's Ansible automation platform. Building on existing certified CloudVision Ansible Modules and the forthcoming certified Ansible Collections, Ansible Playbooks can be used for a variety of DevOps integration scenarios. CloudVision can provide control of the Arista estate while still leveraging the broader Ansible framework for multi-vendor configuration and image management.

“Red Hat Ansible Automation is one of the leading DevOps platforms for infrastructure automation. When combined with Arista’s leadership in programmable network software, we are able to bring more agility to network operations and improve efficiency for our joint customers,” said Red Hat's Peter Sprygada, distinguished engineer, Ansible, in a statement.

The CloudVision 2019 software release and Ansible Playbooks for CloudVision are currently in customer trials and will be generally available next month.