Welcome to the April 2026 Edition of the Arista Federal Newsletter!¶
Welcome to the April edition of the Arista Federal Newsletter. This month, citizens across the United States and around the world celebrate the remarkable success of the Artemis II mission, marking a historic milestone as humanity ventures once again beyond Earth's orbit, travels around the far side of the Moon, and safely returns to Earth.
We extend our congratulations to NASA, the astronauts, and the countless engineers, scientists, and mission teams whose dedication and expertise made this achievement possible. We also recognize the critical contributions of Federal agencies and Federal System Integrators who supported this mission, demonstrating the power of collaboration, innovation, and precision execution in advancing both national and global objectives.
Welcome home, Artemis II - your success is inspiring the next era of exploration.
"The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space." - Carl Sagan - American Astronomer
In this month’s newsletter, you’ll find:
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Why Federal Customers Should Focus on TCO and Not Just Purchase Price
Arista Federal Client Director Kevin Carey breaks down why Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) should be the primary driver in networking decisions and how operational complexity, security, and lifecycle management often outweigh the initial purchase price.
If you’re evaluating network investments for long-term mission success, this is worth a read.
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Arista Announces XPO High-Density Liquid Cooled Pluggable Optics
As Federal agencies advance AI, HPC, and data-intensive mission capabilities, the network must evolve to keep pace. Arista’s introduction of XPO high-density, liquid-cooled pluggable optics represents a significant step forward delivering the scale, performance, and efficiency required to support next-generation AI architectures in DoD, Intelligence, and research environments.
This newsletter is for you and we welcome your feedback, ideas, and requests at fed@aristafederal.com.
Thank you for reading the Arista Federal Newsletter — your go-to source for the latest innovations, industry insights, and mission-focused networking solutions for Federal Agencies and System Integrators.
Arista Blog¶
Why Federal Customers Should Focus on TCO and Not Just Purchase Price¶
By Kevin Carey - Arista Federal Client Director
In Federal environments, networking decisions are often influenced by upfront costs or contract vehicles. However, the true financial impact of a network is realized over time through operations, staffing, downtime, security exposure, and lifecycle complexity. This is why Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) matters more than ever.
A network that is difficult to operate, hard to automate, and complex to secure will quickly erode any perceived savings at purchase. Over a typical 3-5 year lifecycle, Operational Expenses (OpEx) consistently outweigh initial Capital Expenditures (CapEx).
Majority of the costs associated with network infrastructures:
Where the Real Costs Are
The majority of network costs are not in the hardware itself, but in:
- Ongoing operations and staffing
- Manual processes and inefficiencies
- Downtime and troubleshooting
- Security management and vulnerability remediation
- Licensing complexity and lifecycle management
Why Arista Is Different
Built for Operational Efficiency
Arista was designed with an operations-first architecture, delivering measurable cost advantages across the entire lifecycle:
- A single operating system (EOS) across campus, data center, WAN, and AI environments
- Automation and streaming telemetry built-in, not bolted on
- Simple, transparent licensing
- Non-disruptive upgrades and longer hardware lifecycles
- Open, standards-based Ethernet
What This Means for Federal Customers
These architectural advantages translate into real, measurable outcomes:
- Lower operational overhead and reduced staffing requirements
- Faster, safer network changes with less risk
- Reduced downtime and improved mean time to resolution (MTTR)
- Simplified compliance, auditing, and vulnerability management
- Infrastructure that scales efficiently to support AI and evolving mission needs
Proven TCO Impact
Customers transitioning from traditional architectures to Arista typically realize 45-50% reductions in TCO over five years, driven by:
- Reduced operational labor
- Simplified licensing and renewals
- Improved reliability and uptime
- Extended platform lifecycles
These savings often exclude additional benefits such as power and space efficiency. Arista platforms typically consume 60-80% less power and require less rack space than competing solutions further strengthening the overall TCO advantage.
Security & CVE Cost Reduction
Managing Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) is a major operational burden for Federal organizations. Each vulnerability requires analysis, prioritization, and remediation often consuming significant time and resources.
Large enterprises can spend thousands of person-hours annually, sometimes exceeding \$1M in operational costs, just managing vulnerabilities across multiple vendors and platforms.
Arista's advantage comes from software quality and architectural consistency:
- A single, consistent EOS code base
- Fewer bugs and vulnerabilities
- Reduced frequency and severity of CVEs
- Less need for emergency patching and maintenance windows
The result is lower operational burden and more time focused on mission-critical objectives rather than constant remediation.
Arista's best in class software quality ratings for several of their switch and wireless network operating systems.
Bottom Line
Arista's lower TCO is not driven by pricing tactics-it is the result of deliberate architectural choices:
- Operational consistency
- Automation by default
- Transparent licensing
- Open Ethernet standards
These principles enable Federal organizations to operate at scale with fewer resources, fewer tools, and significantly less risk.
In an era of constrained budgets and increasing mission demands, the network must be an enabler, not a cost center.
Additional Insight
For a deeper, data-driven perspective on TCO, see:
"Arista Total Cost of Ownership - Managing Network Infrastructures"
Muhammed Abdulla Marakkoottathil (MM), an independent Network Engineer, provides a clear, data-driven view of where customers are realizing meaningful cost savings.
https://www.networkbachelor.com/arista-network-advantage-lower-tco-with-power-efficient-platforms/
Let's Continue the Conversation
Reach out to your Arista Federal Client Director to discuss how Arista can support your mission while reducing total cost of ownership.
Arista Announces XPO High-Density Liquid Cooled Pluggable Optics¶
As Federal agencies accelerate investments in AI, High Performance Computing (HPC), and mission-critical data platforms, the underlying network infrastructure must evolve to support unprecedented scale, performance, and efficiency. Arista is redefining AI networking by forming a multi-source agreement (MSA) for XPO, a revolutionary 12.8 Tbps liquid-cooled pluggable optics module purpose-built for next-generation AI scale-out architectures.
XPO delivers a 4x increase in density and record-breaking throughput, enabling organizations across the DoD, Intelligence Community, and Federal research environments to scale AI workloads more efficiently while addressing power, space, and thermal constraints common in modern and classified data centers.
For Federal customers, this translates into:
- Greater compute density for AI/ML and analytics workloads
- Improved performance for large-scale model training and inference
- Reduced power and cooling requirements in constrained environments
- Scalable infrastructure to support evolving mission demands
To learn more, please review the resources below:
- Watch the XPO Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t4F95TwSG0
- Executive Blog: AI Datacenters are Reshaping the Optics Industry https://blogs.arista.com/blog/ai-datacenters-are-reshaping-the-optics-industry
- Whitepaper: XPO: Redefining Pluggable Optics for AI Networking https://www.arista.com/assets/data/pdf/Whitepapers/XPO-Whitepaper.pdf
2026 Webinar Series — Coming Soon¶
Our 2026 webinar schedule will be announced shortly, and we look forward to your participation in another year of insightful and informative sessions. In the meantime, we invite you to explore the recordings from our 2025 webinar series featuring valuable discussions, technical deep dives, and best practices across key networking topics.
2025 Webinar replays are available here:
Stay tuned for more details, and we hope you’ll join us for the upcoming 2026 sessions.
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Arista Network Webinars Series with Carahsoft
For Channel Partners Only
Date Name Description TBD TBD TBD
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Webinars
We make is easy for you to view products that are of interest, all virtually! Technical memebers of the team showcase outstading explanation of the products. Click below to see our list of Webinars.
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Events
Join us in person to get a closer look in our list of produts and solution, as well as get the chance to meet members of the team. Click below to see our list of ipcoming Events.
Software Updates¶
Stay informed on the latest software updates across all Arista products and services.
| Software | Version | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| EOS | 4.36.0F 4.35.3.1F 4.35.3F 4.23.10M |
April 9th, 2026 April 8th, 2026 March 20th, 2026 March 2nd, 2026 |
| CVP | Portal 2026.1.0 Appliance 7.1.0 Sensor 1.3.0 |
March 30th, 2026 September 2nd, 2025 December 5th, 2025 |
| DMF | 8.6.3 | March 18th, 2026 |
| CV-CUE | 21.0.0 | January 16th, 2026 |
| Arista NDR | 5.3.5 | July 16th, 2025 |
| TerminAttr | 1.42.1 | February 4th, 2026 |
| VeloCloud SD-WAN Orchestrator/Gateway/Edge |
6.4.1 | December 19th, 2025 |
View All Latest Software Updates
Security Advisories and Field Notices¶
Stay informed on the latest platform security and field notice updates.
Security Advisories¶
- runC — Security Advisory 0135
(April 7th, 2026)
Field Notices¶
- CV-CUE Release Process — Field Notice 0125
(March 11th, 2026)
View All Latest Advisories & Notices
Product Updates¶
Stay up to date on all new Arista Product Releases, as well as End of Sale/End of Support Notices.
New Product Releases * Q1 2026 — Ask AVA - CloudVision as a Service (beta feature)¶
End of Sale / End of Software Support¶
- April 10th, 2026 — CloudVision Portal 2024.3 Release Train
- April 10th, 2026 — DCS-7280CR3K-36S Series Switches
- April 10th, 2026 — DCS-7280CR3K-48YC8 Series Switches
- April 10th, 2026 — DCS-7280CR3K-32P4, DCS-7280CR3K-32D4, DCS-7280CR3MK-32P4 Series Switches
- March 13th, 2026 — EOS-4.30 Release Train
View All Latest End of Sale & Support Notices
Don't Forget!¶
Arista has revamped their certifications! The new Arista Certified Engineer (ACE) program is now organized by specific tracks like Cloud Data Center, Campus, and Automation to better align with your job role.
Feel Free to Reach Out To Us For Your Network Needs¶
We thank you for taking the time to read out newsletter today. Feel free to reach out to your SE or ASE for more information or questions regardsing your network operations. Until next month, have a good one!