One of the best presentations we had last week during the Net Field Day 2010 was given by Doug Gourlay from Arista. Their products have numerous highly interesting features; Terry liked their use of TDR and I was particularly delighted by the VM Tracer and decided to write about it as soon as I find some time (read: today).

2012-09-29: To keep the record straight: a few months after I wrote this blog post, Arista made most of the EOS documentation available online (as of today, it's latest version only, with no release notes).

Finding the marketing presentation was easy (just ask Google), but I wanted to have some more hard facts and tried to find product documentation. The link to the documentation in the support section was very obvious, but access to it requires registration (grumble, grumble). To add insult to injury, once I’ve registered, I found out that only users with valid support contract can access documentation. I just stared in disbelief; I couldn’t imagine someone taking this approach in the 21st century.

Next I tried to find a backdoor. I’d already downloaded virtualized copy of vEOS and the registration message (yes, I’d had to register then as well) contained link to some initial documentation ... but even that link was broken. I truly appreciate receiving a complex piece of software with ZERO documentation (11-page quick start guide doesn’t count). That’s a definite bonus when I try evaluating whether I should be using a specific product in my network.

Greg Ferro wrote at length what HP should do if they want to establish themselves in the networking market. It looks other vendors are no better ... apart from an exception that just happens to be a market leader in numerous segments. Looks like they might be doing something right.