Powered by Arista VESPA and expanded AVA for operational excellence
Arista Networks (NYSE: ANET), a leading provider of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) networking solutions, today announced significant advancements for Cognitive Campus scale including the introduction of Arista Virtual Ethernet Segment with Proxy ARP (Arista VESPA) for WLAN mobility, enabling customers to deploy large-scale mobility domains. The company also announced an expansion of Arista AVA (Autonomous Virtual Assist) agentic AI, designed to further streamline AI Ops use cases as well as key additions to its campus switching portfolio that bring the power, reliability, and operational simplicity of Arista's EOS (Extensible Operating System) to outdoor environments.
"Arista is experiencing continual momentum in the campus, as customers see the benefit of a single, consistent network experience across all domains, including the AI and data center, cloud, campus, branch, and enterprise WAN," said Todd Nightingale, President and COO for Arista. "By applying AI principles through Arista EOS, a unified data lake (NetDL) and now AVA, Arista is helping to unburden customers from vendor silos and tool sprawl, while reducing complexity to deliver best-in-class user experience with an always-on network."
Scaling Campus Mobility
Arista VESPA addresses critical scaling limits faced by major enterprises as they experience exponential growth in the number of clients and IoT devices. By bringing consistent, large-scale principles typically used in the data center to campus networks, Arista VESPA enables customers to design massive Wi-Fi roaming domain networks with over 500,000 clients. This ensures a highly resilient architecture with sub-second failover while removing the architectural complexity and hardware dependency of traditional controller-based solutions.
"As one of the largest public universities, the ASU Wi-Fi environment has to support a vast and dynamic campus community. In transitioning to Arista's controller-less Wi-Fi, we've partnered with them to help shape and validate the development of Arista's VESPA architecture a standards-based approach designed to provide a seamless wireless roaming domain that improves connectivity across the university," said Jorge De Cossio, Senior Director, Digital Infrastructure, Enterprise Technology for Arizona State University.
AI for Networking with AVA
AVA now delivers a truly unified agentic AI framework for networking, establishing a foundation for autonomous, self-driving networks. This provides operational simplicity and proactive intelligence into AIOps, fundamentally transforming how campus networks are managed.
Powered by Arista EOS, AVA provides the open, programmable interface necessary for AI agents to interact with the network, while NetDL serves as the central, comprehensive repository for all network and related data, including that from third-party partners.
This combination creates a single source of truth and the necessary context that enables AI agents, whether from Arista or third parties via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), to make truly intelligent, informed decisions across the entire infrastructure. These foundational elements enable AVA's expanded capabilities, including:
- Multi-domain Event Correlation across wired, wireless, data center, and security to pinpoint a single root cause.
- Agentic Conversational and Troubleshooting Capabilities in Ask AVA for sophisticated, multi-turn dialogue that follows your train of thought.
- Continuous Monitoring and Automated Root Cause Analysis for proactive issue identification.
Cognitive Campus for the Industrial Edge
Arista is also introducing two new ruggedized platforms, 710HXP-28TXH and 710HXP-20TNH, expanding Arista's portfolio to support demanding industrial or outdoor environments across various sectors.
The new platforms include:
- A 20-port Din Rail switch with an IP50 rating.
- A 1RU 24-port switch with an IP30 rating.
Both platforms are specifically engineered for harsh environments and can withstand extreme temperatures, vibrations, and shocks. Equipped with multi-gig and high-power 90W ports, they are designed to support next-generation devices such as Wi-Fi 7 access points and high-powered outdoor security cameras. By supporting Arista EOS and CloudVision, these ruggedized switches ensure a single, consistent operational model.
All the newly announced software capabilities and switch platforms are expected to be generally available by Q1' 2026.
Read more about today's announcement in a BLOG authored by Kumar Srikantan, VP and GM Campus and Sriram Venkiteswaran, Senior Director, Product Line management. Join us for a webinar on January 22, 2026. Register HERE.
About Arista Networks
Arista Networks is an industry leader in data-driven, client-to-cloud networking for large AI, data center, campus, and routing environments. Its award-winning platforms deliver availability, agility, automation, analytics, and security through an advanced network operating stack. For more information, visit www.arista.com.
ARISTA, EOS, and AVA are among the registered and unregistered trademarks of Arista Networks, Inc. in jurisdictions around the world. Other company names or product names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Additional information and resources can be found at www.arista.com. This press release contains forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the performance and capabilities of Arista's products and services. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, including rapid technological and market change, customer requirements, and industry standards, as well as other risks stated in our filings with the SEC available on Arista's website at www.arista.com and the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Arista disclaims any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251210464060/en/
Contacts:
Media Contact:
Amanda Jaramillo
Corporate Communications
Tel: (408) 547-5798
amanda@arista.com
Investor Contact:
Investor Advocacy
Rudolph Araujo
Rod Hall
Tel: (408) 547-8080
ir@arista.com
