Alex Arcilla
Validation analyst Alex Arcilla contributes to ESG’s technical and economic validations of emerging networking, cloud, and storage solutions. Prior to ESG, she held analyst roles at IDC and Gigaom, covering semiconductors and mobile technologies. But she is most passionate about networking, as she held product marketing roles at Cisco and Agilent and engineering roles at AT&T Labs.
Alex earned her dual M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Statistics from Rutgers University, and her M.B.A. from Cornell University. She is currently working towards AWS certification.
When her nose is not in her laptop, she trains for long-distance races, samples coffee and chocolate, and still searches for the best NYC-style pizza in the Bay Area, CA.
Co-Author(s): Bob Laliberte
Challenges
Implementing a software-defined data center strategy is one of surveyed organizations’ three most-cited areas of data center modernization investment in 2019 according to ESG research.1 A significant part of this transition will include virtualizing the network using an overlay technology (such as VMware NSX) to run on top of an underlay physical network. While this combination provides flexibility and agility, a lack of visibility between the two layers means that organizations either overprovision the underlay network or risk configuration errors when deploying virtual networks. Without unified visibility across the two network layers, organizations rely on multiple management screens and extensive, error-prone manual correlation to ensure the underlying physical infrastructure has been configured correctly to support the desired virtual network. They may also overprovision virtual networks without knowing if sufficient networking capacity exists and create areas of network congestion. Given the pace of business and mandate to accelerate new products and services as part of digital transformation initiatives, organizations must have the appropriate level of network visibility to ensure that they can bring up new network services quickly and efficiently.
Introduction
This ESG Technical Validation documents hands-on testing of the Arista Cognitive Campus solution, comprised of the Arista campus spline switches, PoE access/leaf switches, Arista WiFi access points, and CloudVision network management software. We validated that the Arista solution provides the functionality customers expect in campus networking solutions, such as IP Phone support and integrated wired and wireless network management leveraging a single software platform. Furthermore, ESG tested Arista’s Cognitive Campus for flow and device visibility, management, and security.
Abstract
This ESG Technical Review documents hands-on validation of Forward Enterprise, a solution developed by Forward Networks to help organizations save time and resources when verifying that their IT networks can deliver application traffic consistently in line with network and security policies. The review examines how Forward Enterprise can reduce network downtime, ensure compliance with policies, and minimize adverse impact of configuration changes on network behavior.
