Founded To Pioneer and Deliver Software-Driven Cloud Networking Solutions: Arista Networks

“We build and deliver innovative, high-quality products and services through commitment, innovation and uncompromising focus on customer needs.”

Arista Networks was founded in 2004 to pioneer and deliver software-driven cloud networking solutions for large data center storage and computing environments. Arista’s award-winning platforms, ranging in Ethernet speeds from 10 to 100 gigabits per second, redefine scalability, agility, and resilience. Arista has shipped more than 15 million cloud networking ports worldwide with CloudVision and EOS, an advanced network operating system. Committed to open standards, Arista is a founding member of the 25/50GbE consortium.

At the core of the company’s platform are 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 Arista team is comprised of experienced management and engineering talent from leading networking companies. Arista designs revolutionary products in California and delivers them worldwide through distribution partners, systems integrators, and resellers with a strong dedication to partner and customer success. The firm has offices in the USA, Canada, India, Ireland, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Deep Dive into Arista

Arista was launched in 2008 and is led by Jayshree Ullal. The seasoned management team has a rich and extensive history in networking and innovation. Arista was recognized by Gartner as a “leader” in its “2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Networking” based on a number of factors, including high growth, technology solutions, and flexible software. The Arista team is globally recognized as respected leaders and visionaries in networking technology.

Arista has a prestigious set of customers, including leading global technology companies in financials, web 2.0 and cloud/service providers, building public and private cloud computing systems. Arista builds scalable data centers for many Fortune 500 companies and delivers products worldwide through distribution partners, systems integrators, and resellers with a strong dedication to partner and customer success.

Brief Outlook at the Product Offerings

Arista EOS is the most advanced network operating system to enable open third party development. The award-winning software is built upon a stable, open source Linux core with a central state-oriented database that makes EOS inherently self-healing, in-service upgradeable and extremely robust. Arista EOS Central offers access to development tools, scripting examples, and support to deliver real-world solutions that bridge the gap between what vendors build and what users want. Arista actively shares code samples, engages in collaborative forums, and posts works in progress to get early insight into use cases.

Arista Networks is a leader in building scalable, high-performance and ultra-low latency cloud networks with low power consumption and a small footprint for modern data center and cloud computing environments. Purpose-built hardware with Arista 7000 family and Arista EOS, maximize system uptime, stateful fault repair, Advanced Event Management, Zero Touch Provisioning, latency analysis and a fully accessible Linux shell. Arista’s Ethernet switching solutions include native support for VMware, network-virtualization and hundreds of applications. Arista’s hardware platforms are designed to meet the stringent power and cooling requirements of today’s most demanding data centers, proven advantages already in use in many of the largest cloud data centers around the world.

Sneak Peek at the Arista’s Solutions

Software Driven Cloud Networking:

Arista Networks has championed the guiding cloud principles of cloud leaders with network designs serving private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, enterprise, and high-performance network use cases. These include the use of open APIs, cloud automation features, and self-service provisioning and deployment – coupled with an open approach to network integration, customer programmability, and simplified standards-based deployment architectures.

Arista’s Universal Cloud Network (UCN) delivers these common cloud principles for simplified networking topologies and architectures across use-cases. As siloed Places-In-the-Network (PINs) are normalized to become standardized Places-In-the-Cloud (PICs), Arista’s UCN provides a consistent operational experience and simplifies the model for customers to extend their data center networking practices to many other use-cases.

Cloud-Grade Routing:

The proliferation of cloud architectures and principles are transforming the traditional routing landscape. New business models around Service Provider NFV, Cloud WAN, Content Edge, and data center interconnect (DCI) is disrupting the traditional approaches to networking.

Arista’s Routing solution applies the cloud networking principles of “scale-out, simplify, software-driven networking” beyond the data center to routing use-cases. These solutions are based on Arista’s 7280R Universal Leaf and 7500R Universal Spine platforms, powered by Arista EOS^® and CloudVision^®. Customers can leverage these platforms for roles that require high-performance Routing, combined with high port density and deep buffers, integrated DWDM with wire-speed MACSec encryption and cloud automation, which traditional Routers are unable to offer. With the Arista FlexRoute™ engine in Arista’s R-series portfolio, customers can now architect, transform and modernize their Routing layer for different applications. Additionally, with the advanced telemetry solutions along with security at scale, delivered with Arista AlgoMatch, customers can avail highest visibility and security for their networks.

Cognitive Campus:

Arista Cognitive Cloud Networking for the Campus takes a simplified approach to addressing campus network challenges compared to the siloed complexity of legacy solutions. Based on the same open cloud networking principles used to build modern cloud data centers, Arista’s Cognitive Cloud Networking leverages EOS^® and CloudVision^®, extending the Universal Cloud Network (UCN) architecture to the campus. Leveraging a consistent software-driven approach reduces complexity, leads to higher reliability and performance and streamlines automation, monitoring, and security.

Arista Any Cloud Platform:

As enterprises move from on-premises and user-provisioned cloud computing to multi-cloud deployment models, the burden is left with enterprise IT to accommodate an architectural approach across clouds. With the Any Cloud Platform, Arista is extending two proven software technologies, EOS^® and CloudVision^®, to empower enterprise IT with a consistent multi-cloud architectural and operational approach.

IP Storage and Big Data:

The networking demands of big data analytics, flash-based and scale-out storage, and hyper-converged compute solutions are driving a migration from legacy fiber channel to next-generation IP-based storage networks. These next-generation storage applications require an open, programmable, lossless and highly available IP storage networking solution in order to support their unique traffic patterns.

Security for Cloud Datacenters:

Organizations today are embracing cloud-based approaches in their datacenter to achieve greater levels of agility and operational efficiency. Greater network scale, dense virtualization, information profusion by big data and analytics need security, protecting critical data and end-user privacy, and assuring business continuity. This is leading to a demand for a new approach to network and data security.

Arista’s Software-Driven Cloud Networking provides IT and security operations teams with software-driven visibility and control that encompasses automation, services and comprehensive visibility needed to:

• Maintain an agile and cost-efficient cloud infrastructure for any workload on-demand
• Inspect all east-west traffic for profiled attack patterns with redirect analysis
• Maintain next-generation firewall security rules for all at-risk traffic at any scale, in-line, all the time

Doing Things the “Arista Way”

Arista was founded on the principle of doing things the “Arista Way.” The Arista Way is to drive for customer success in every aspect of what it does. This includes a commitment to designing, manufacturing and delivering leading software-driven cloud networking solutions in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner. The company believes that sustainability and business growth are closely linked, and delivering on products that are sustainable truly enables its customer’s success.

The Environmental Friendly Organization

The company’s Santa Clara Headquarters and its San Francisco office are both LEED Gold certified. The certification, awarded by the US Green Building Council, is based on the properties’ use of sustainable materials, water, and energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality, location and transportation and overall innovation.

Arista headquarters, which are managed by the Irvine Company, include environmentally friendly features such as floor-to-ceiling windows that filter heat and maximize natural light, and energy efficient lighting, heating, cooling, and ventilation. In addition, high-efficiency plumbing fixtures and landscape irrigation systems are installed to conserve water at a critical time for California. Additional features include alternative commuting with onsite electric vehicle charging stations, priority parking for hybrid vehicles and bike lockers throughout the campus. Nearby light-rail and bus service is provided by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority.

In The Words of the Clients...

“Overall, this has been a very successful project for us that has removed much of the complexity of our network while building a solid foundation that allows us to keep scaling the network to better serve the business.”

- Yaniv Katz, Director for Data Center Engineering at LivePerson

“We worked well as a team. We went from proof of concept to migrating nearly 95% of our infrastructure in just a few months without any unplanned outages and only minor issues that were quickly resolved through simple configuration changes.“

- Andreas Hagin, lead engineer for infrastructure at Helvetia

“In the end, Arista was a very simple choice for us. Arista was a case where you could do everything and you got everything, which was really refreshing as they were not holding back. The sales cycle was good from start to finish.”

- Ariel Pisetzky, VP of IT for Taboola

“The performance of the Arista switches has exceeded our expectation and as the higher density design has allowed us to reduce our rack space and energy consumption.”

- Thomas Mangin, technical director and co-founder of Exa Networks

The Queen of Networks

Jayshree Ullal, President, and CEO:

Jayshree Ullal is a networking executive veteran with 30+ years of experience. In 2015 she was co-awarded “EY 2015 Entrepreneur of the Year” across National USA and “#3 IT Industry Disrupter” by CRN. In 2005, she was named one of the “50 Most Powerful People” by Network World and one of the “Top Executives” by Forbes magazine in 2012. As President and CEO for nine years, Jayshree led Arista Networks to a successful IPO in June 2014 at NYSE. She is responsible for building a multibillion-dollar business in cloud networking and has forged strategic alliances with Microsoft, HP, and VMware to name a few.

Formerly, Jayshree was Senior Vice President at Cisco and responsible for $10B in direct annual revenue from Data Center, Switching, and Services, including Cisco’s flagship Nexus 7000 and Catalyst 5000, 4500 and 6500 product lines. Prior to joining Cisco, Ullal was the Vice President of Marketing at Crescendo Communications, which was Cisco’s first acquisition in 1993.

Jayshree holds a B.S. in Engineering (Electrical) from San Francisco State University and an M.S. degree in engineering management from Santa Clara University. She is a 2016 recipient of the SFSU Distinguished Alumni Award and 2013 Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award at SCU

“We are the leader in building scalable high-performance and ultra-low-latency networks for today’s data center and cloud computing environments.”