On 24 April 2016 at 09:08, Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> wrote: Hey,
I guess you are right the QFX10002-36Q is probably a better comparison. But let's be honest, Juniper is not going to sell a QFX10002-36Q for less than $20k like Arista will do for a semi- similar box. Even with a high discount (like 90 percent off list), the Juniper QFX10002-36Q at $360k list price comes nowhere close on the price point. Cisco, Juniper, ALU, etc are all not going to see a low cost high density fixed switch because that would cannibalize on their sales on the larger platforms. I really think Arista is kind of unique here as they don't have another routing platform to cannibalize, so they are competitively pricing their platform.
20k seems a stretch, that's like 94.5% discount, it's not unheard off. If you have volume, I would imagine it being doable.
So I guess the question becomes, what features are missing that Arista does not currently have? They seems to be adding more and more features, and taking more market share. Here is a list of features supported: https://www.arista.com/en/support/product-documentation/supported-features I have not personally used Arista myself, but I like what I am seeing as far as price point, company culture, and repruatation in the market place. I know their switching is solid, but I am not sure about their routing.
Yeah they are ccertainly much behind in features, but if you don't need those features, it's probably actually an advantage. For my use-cases Arista's MPLS stack is not there.
Arista claims to have much, much faster BGP convergence time than all the other vendors.
I wouldn't be surprised, but honestly the competition does not set the bar high there. -- ++ytti