RE: Arista Routing Solutions

[Timothy Creswick <Timothy.Creswick () vorboss com>]

> Just wanted to interject, the port density of the Arista switches is quite
> impressive, especially considering the price point they're at.

Not in response to any point specifically, but the major issue which stopped us buying Arista a few months ago was the 
rather out-dated attitude to 3rd party transceiver support.

I'm sure there are plenty of people running Arista on 3rd party optics, but all the noises that were being made by the 
sales and technical guys suggested that we could find ourselves abandoned by their support or a policy change in the 
future. 

I don't fundamentally have an issue with vendor optics, except when they are excessively priced. One or two vendors 
will actually sell their 10Gbps optics at a price that's pretty hard to refuse, given that it's all supported. The same 
couldn't be said in this case.

Additionally, the insistence that we would have to buy a "small number" of Arista optics with each device for testing 
purposes gets old very quickly. Again, I could get on-board with this if it's just for troubleshooting, but not when 
these additional optics suddenly add 15% to the overall buy price of each switch. At that point, other vendors are 
firmly back on the table.

YMMV of course, I suspect especially if you're buying 100s of boxes.

T