Cognitive WiFi - Arista Networks
Enabling wireless networks to learn, predict, protect, and progress, Arista’s Cognitive WiFi™ solution optimizes the wireless experience. Harnessing the power of the cloud, big data analytics, and automation, Cognitive WiFi augments network admin capacity with the power of intelligence, speed, and accuracy. Through root cause analysis and proactive problem resolution options, Cognitive WiFi also reduces the mean-time-to-resolve problems, minimizing troubleshooting effort for the network.
The new next-gen APs C-260 and C-250 is designed with the latest in Wireless technology for high-performance scenarios. WiFi6 technology enables higher data rates and increased capacity. It also helps improve the battery life of client devices. Uplink and Downlink OFDMA and MU-MIMO lowers latency and enables communication with multiple client devices at the same time. This is the ideal AP for a dynamic environment with a large variety of client devices.
WiFi 6 Access Point Comparison Matrix
**Scroll bar available at bottom of each table to view results on small screens
WiFi 5 Access Point Comparison Matrix
Key Features
- Centralized configuration and policy management
- Cognitive cloud-based network baselining and troubleshooting with root cause analysis engine
- WiFi analytics for business intelligence
- Wireless Intrusion Prevention (WIPS)
- Application Visibility and Control
- Visual packet trace and analysis
- Wireless Access Security
- Client location tracking
- Wired-wireless monitoring
- Multifunctional management of
- 3rd radio for client emulation and intelligent RF
- API Integration
- Cloud and On-Premises options
Overview
Harnessing the power of the cloud, big data analytics, machine learning, and automation, CloudVision WiFi (CV WiFi) brings the power of intelligence, speed, and accuracy to wireless networks. Through root cause analysis and proactive problem resolution options, CloudVision WiFi reduces the mean-time-to resolve problems minimizing network troubleshooting effort while reducing the total cost of ownership.
Enterprise-ready cloud architecture
CloudVision WiFi is powered by a cognitive management plane that simplifies configuration and troubleshooting while delivering richer telemetry to network administrators. A centralized management plane remarkably simplifies policy management and provisioning of WiFi networks. A flexible data plane allows wireless access points to provide customizable traffic redirection at the network’s edge. A distributed control plane enables enterprise WiFi features without the scalability issues of older architectures - and an innovative cognition plane with streaming telemetry automates WiFi network monitoring and troubleshooting to optimize the WiFi user experience and minimize the meantime to resolution (MTTR) for network access and performance issues.
Simplicity Redefined
Centrally managing a WiFi network has many advantages - it is simple to change a network configuration globally, physically locate a WiFi device, view real-time or historical experience of WiFi users or capture and visualize a packet trace from a remote site.
Mission-critical Reliability
Arista’s distributed architecture ensures there is no loss of functionality if connectivity to the management plane is lost. The WiFi network continues to support mission-critical applications and secure airspace at all times. Automated disaster recovery and high-availability ensure users do not experience downtime even in the event of a datacenter- or region-wide incidence.
Federal-grade Security
The Arista Cloud implements multiple tiers of security— including strong access controls, two-factor authentication, regular vulnerability scanning and management, encryption of data in transit (TLS), and at rest (EBS and S3), and PII data privacy. The security measures certifications are SSAE SOC 2 Type II and FIPS 140-2.
Seamless Scalability
With virtually unlimited and elastic availability of storage and compute resources, the Arista cloud eliminates artificial boundaries inherent in controller-based WLAN architectures. Naturally, it enables many innovative, previously unforeseen applications in big data analytics, machine learning, and cognitive computing in the context of WiFi.
Flexible Data Plane
Decoupling of data, management, and control planes results in tremendous flexibility in data traffic forwarding. Traffic from the Arista APs can be locally routed or tunneled to a central aggregation point, e.g., an Arista switch. APs support VXLAN and EoGRE based tunneling. This allows enterprises to migrate their existing controller-based WiFi networks to Arista’s controller-less cloud architecture without having to change the design of their underlying campus network. Tunneling of data to a central aggregation point may also be required by certain enterprises for regulatory compliance and by service providers for ease of billing. CV WiFi enables the configuration and monitoring of EoGRE and VXLAN endpoints on WiFi APs. Tunnels can be configured in redundant mode with automatic failover.
Cognitive Management Plane
Arista uses cognitive computing to deliver the best experience possible for WiFi administrators and users.
Location Tracking
CloudVision WIFi supports tracking the location of any WiFi APs and clients on a floor. It enables visualization of WiFi associations and includes filtering based on client or user information, or connectivity or performance issues. It can be used for mapping of WiFi client connectivity and performance issues in the context of their physical location.
Wired-wireless Monitoring
CV WiFi provides information about the wired interface on Arista WiFi Access Points. This includes upstream PoE switch details, DHCP options, and VLANs seen by the AP. As this information is gathered from LLDP packets, it is available irrespective of the PoE switch vendor, as long as it supports LLDP. Information about AP health, in the form of CPU and memory utilization, is also displayed on the UI.
Client Journey™
CloudVision WiFi provides direct and real-time insight into the experience of WiFi clients as they journey on the network. Client Journey tracks when and why clients fail to connect to the network, reporting latencies of network services such as AAA, DHCP, and DNS. Administrators can drill down and access live and historical client connection logs to aid troubleshooting.
Network Baselining
Using ML algorithms on the data it collects, CV WiFi baselines network behavior and automatically detects and highlights anomalies. Baselining is done for connection failures, RF performance KPIs and application QoE. When necessary it finetunes the WiFi network to optimize the user experience and provides recommendations to resolve network problems.
Root Cause Analysis Engine
CloudVision WiFi employs built-in domain expertise and protocol level intelligence to help administrators maintain the network. In real-time, it automatically detects and classifies WiFi clients’ connection failures and pinpoints the root cause—if it is related to WiFi or to a network service such as DHCP or DNS, a client device, or an application. Similarly, it automates root cause analysis of poor performance, such as poor coverage, high retry rate, and sticky clients.
Single Client Inferencing
WiFi clients may face poor experience due to various reasons. CV WiFi identifies such clients based on RF and application KPIs and then uses the Single Client Inferencing engine for automated root cause analysis of problems faced by clients.
Automatic Packet Capture
CV WiFi proactively captures packet traces to help diagnose problems. The traces are stored alongside related failures or symptoms to simplify troubleshooting later. Packet traces can be downloaded or directly visualized in Arista Packets, the cloud-based, visual WiFi packet analyzer.
Client Emulation and Network Profiling
CV WiFi takes advantage of the 3rd multi-function radio, present in most Arista WiFi APs, turning it into a client to run a wide variety of tests and proactively identify problems before users do. This helps validate the network’s readiness for supporting business-critical applications.
Intelligent RF Optimizations
Unparalleled visibility in both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz enables automatic RF optimizations such as band steering, smart steering, auto channel selection or auto transmit power control to maximize WiFi capacity. Real-time application performance is further enhanced with multicast-to-unicast conversion and smart blocking, pruning, and optimization of broadcast and multicast traffic.
Wireless Intrusion Prevention
With the third radio acting as dedicated wireless intrusion prevention (WIPS) sensor, wireless threats are detected and blocked almost instantly in your network. CV WiFi works with the APs, which are powered by patented techniques such as Marker PacketsTM, to enable surgical over-the-air intrusion prevention, automatically and accurately creating alerts and classifying wireless threats.
WiFi Analytics
Analytics based on the presence and behavior of WiFi devices can provide significant business intelligence and can inform business functions such as
- marketing research (A/B testing of storefront displays, measure ROI of marketing campaigns, context-based guest engagement)
- operations (staff planning, optimize facility utilization),
- IT (network planning and design based on user density).
The gathered data is based on WiFi device MAC addresses collected from Probe Requests, content analytics and application visibility based on WiFi connections, and engagement analytics based on WiFi users who opt-in and choose to share their personal information.
And so much more to the capability and features of Cognitive WiFi!
Have more questions about Arista Networks Cloud Switching and Routing products and solutions? Call us at 410-583-1701 or email us at questions@pulsesupply.com.