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minutes. Providing immediate access to chief developers and senior people across the organisation provided Betfair with massive con?dence in Arista’s ability to support and be passionate about their products,” Turner con?rms. Arista Networks was founded to deliver cloud networking solutions for large data centre and highperformance computing environments. Arista delivers a portfolio of Gigabit and 10GE switches that rede?ne network architectures, bring extensibility to networking, and dramatically change the price/performance of data centre networks. At the core of Arista's platform is the Extensible Operating System (EOS™), a ground-breaking network operating system with single-image consistency across hardware platforms, and modern core architecture enabling in-service upgrades and application extensibility. The solution in place is highly scalable, allowing Betfair to con?dently plan to retain the switching chassis for up to ?ve years. “Using MLAG within the Arista switching platform allows Betfair to have redundancy in the network and still utilise the backup links,” Turner explains. “This model allows Betfair to scale the platform without worrying about spanning tree or other legacy technologies, or worrying about throughput: the non-blocking technology delivers 10GE throughout.” This latter point is key, since prior to the investment in the Arista switching technology, it was hard to predict the impact of a major event, such as the Grand National, on the network infrastructure. Turner con?rms: “Betfair can now con?dently grow this 10GE platform for the next three to ?ve years. Furthermore, from an operational perspective, there is no need for the dramatic retuning required with other switch technologies.” The intuitive command line used by Arista enabled Betfair to undertake the implementation of the switches internally. “There was no need for any help with the deployment; it
went like a dream,” says Turner. “And in the 12 months the system has been in production, Betfair has had no hardware failures.” In addition, the agile based development approach adopted by Arista creates highly modular, discrete pieces of code, enabling Betfair to undertake rapid ?xes or patches as required. “When there is big sporting event coming up there can be no lag in ?xing a problem,” he says. “The combination of agile development and Arista’s support excellence has been key in maintaining Betfair’s uptime record.” Indeed, in any complex, multi-vendor network infrastructure, speed and relevance of support response can be variable while vendors debate where the problem lies. “Where Arista is connecting with other switch vendors, the company’s support team responds with ideas about both Arista and other vendor technologies before most vendors have even acknowledged there is a problem,” Turner says. “The speed of response from Arista and access to quality engineers, even the developers if required, is really powerful and a signi?cant operational gain.” In this fast changing betting marketplace, Betfair continues to lead the market in innovation. However, it is the company’s commitment to service availability that is a critical differentiator. “Any online business has to assume that downtime will lead to customer switching. Availability and performance are critical to Betfair,” Turner con?rms. Over the next 12 to 18 months, Betfair will continue to focus on its customer commitment to availability while beginning to accommodate the cloud approach. “Making the decision to go outside the traditional switch vendors was signi?cant for Betfair. Arista’s agile approach to both development and support was an important factor in that decision,” Turner says. “Taking the innovative route has been an excellent decision – not only is Arista’s 10GE switch technology well engineered but, more importantly, the organisation’s ?exible, open approach matches Betfair’s strategy of cloud computing platforms.”
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