Arista 7000 series vs. Huawei Ethernet Switches

Core and data center applications are the strengths of Arista products. The distribution layer is also a good fit. For the access layer, it would be more of a niche product.

Incentivized

Huawei switches are ideal for cases where performance is not essential, for low traffic solutions and for equipment management. It is not recommended for situations of high performance and stress, immediate availability and high scalability. It is also not advisable to use them in solutions that involve hardware from other brands, the integration of Huawei with Cisco, for example, is very traumatic and the results were not optimal in my case.

Incentivized

• The 7304's along side our core network design has provided 100% uptime during the 5 years of deployment.
• The multi-chassis LAG has provided near 100% connectivity to the distribution and access switches.
• Very low maintenance attention is needed.

Incentivized

• Scalability
• High throughput links
• Redundancy of links with resilient protocols
• Fast switching in the event of a redundant link failure.

Incentivized

• The 7304's lack a graceful non-intrusive upgrade method even though they are dual supervisor.
• I would like to see more integration with Aruba's ClearPass and Airwave products.

Incentivized

• One of our switches encounted a hardware defect after 6 months of use (but was replaced within warranty)
• The switches appear to get hotter than what I would expect under normal use

Incentivized

The switches perform very well in our core backbone and also in metro Ethernet networks. We are able to provide high service availability and greater resilience for our customers. The switches also provide high performance in several data centers where we have a presence focused on IX exchange. They are also very useful as CPEs.

I have used the Catalyst 6500 series in the past. From my point of view, the Arista surpasses the Catalyst on just about every front. Originally we were planning on implementing the Nexus 7000/7700 series switches for our core. Though a little more feature rich, it did not provide features we needed that the Arista did. The Nexus also was a confusing and complex platform to work with. Also, the Nexus was a significantly more expensive solution. Although very happy with the Arista switches we may evaluate the Aruba HPE 8400 chassis-based switches along with Arista switches in the future.

Incentivized

The performance of Huawei is lower than Cisco, but initially the costs inclined the decision towards Huawei, but unfortunately, it was not, the licenses and the manager fired the investment to make it very similar to cisco. Therefore it is preferable to go to the Cisco switches for reliability and robustness.

Incentivized

• The Arista 7000 series met or exceed our data center switching and routing needs.
• It provided a more cost effective alternative to other products we were considering.
• Implementation was quick and easy due to the simple standards-based configuration.

Incentivized

• Revenue Increase
• Greater satisfaction for our customers.
• Greater compliance with SLAs

Incentivized