If you’re in the Netherlands on 30 June, why not join distributed enterprise-focused edge networking ‘protect and connect’ specialist Arista at the NL network operator group’s technical Labs & BBQ event?
Sponsored by Arista alongside some 25 other vendors including Duocast, Juniper Networks and NTT, the NLNOG Labs & BBQ will start at 3pm on Friday, with a barbecue from 6pm at Bit MeetMe, Galileïlaan 17, 6716 BP Ede.
“This time, the topic will be networking labs: how to simulate your network for such things as better change planning. We’ll have some excellent experts shining their light on this challenging topic,” according to the organiser announcement.
“Afterwards, it’s time to catch up with some food and drinks, friendly NLNOG-ers and great weather (there, we jinxed it)!”
For Arista partners and customers, the approach to discuss is about modernising the WAN all the way from clients and endpoints at the edge to the cloud while keeping organisations secure as well as connected.
As Arista vice-president of software Douglas Gourlay explained in a blog post early this year, the evolution of WAN architectures has historically paralleled that of application architectures.
“When we primarily connected terminals to mainframes, the WAN architecture was largely point-to-point links connecting back to datacentre facilities,” he wrote.
As traffic converged to remove opex-intensive parallel network structures, the WAN evolved into architectures for site-to-site connectivity in full mesh or configurable mesh with multi-tenancy to tackle carrier costs.
“Today’s application architectures are massively deconstructed and distributed,” Gourlay added.
“We often see enterprise architectures where a single workflow requires dozens of interconnected applications and systems often running in SaaS providers, the public clouds, and on-premises datacentres while supporting client connectivity from critical sites, campus locations, and users from their homes and all over the world.”
Interconnecting with the public cloud and the use of public cloud provider backbones has become needed, alongside network architecture that is application-aware and simplifies traffic engineering, appropriately and automatically routing application traffic.
At the same time, service levels must be sustained and secured across private networks, multi-carrier networks and the public internet.
That’s typically including edge devices that must be securely managed, for which Arista also offers ETM Dashboard, NG Firewall and Micro Edge for the cloud distributed enterprise.
