[Bro] arista & cpacket experience

[Mike Patterson]

> On Oct 20, 2014, at 6:31 AM, Juan Caballero <juan.caballero at imdea.org> wrote:
> 

(about a 10 gig cluster expecting 3-4 gig peaks, wanting a way to more easily manage the distribution of traffic to monitoring systems, asking specifically about Arista and CPacket)

> Does anyone have experience with these products? Do those models make sense
> for the description above?

We’ve been using an Arista 7150S for exactly this purpose, and our requirements are pretty similar (10 gig links, expected peaks are 4-4.5 gig, although we’ve seen 6-7). I can’t speak to CPacket. But yes, the Arista will fit exactly into what you want and pricing on them is pretty good.

We don’t do load balancing on the switch though, we’re doing it on the NICs. I have a machine with an Endace DAG (older box, pre-Arista) and several with Intel x520 NICs using PF_RING. There should be several others on the list feeding Aristas to Intels, although I’ll let them speak about their own experiences. I’m finding I get better performance out of the DAG box, although not 10,000 dollars better performance (which is about the price gap).

> Any recommendations or things to consider for people without prior
> experience in such setups?

Whatever you pick, figure out a way to integrate monitoring it into your environment, or accept that you’ll get to monitor it yourself. And unless your NOC is heavily invested in these things too, chances are it will be the latter, so you’ll get to play sysadmin too. :)

Mike