Arista Networks


Arista Networks is an American computer networking company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking solutions for large datacenter, cloud computing, high-performance computing, and high-frequency trading environments. These products include an array of 10/25/40/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet low-latency cut-through switches, including the 7124SX, which remained the fastest switch using SFP+ optics through September 2012, with its sub-500 nanosecond latency, and the 7500 series, Arista's modular 10G/40G/100Gbit/s switch. Arista's own Linux-based network operating system, Extensible Operating System, runs on all Arista products.

Corporate history

In 1982, Andy Bechtolsheim cofounded Sun Microsystems, and was its chief hardware designer. In 1995, David Cheriton cofounded Granite Systems with Bechtolsheim, a company that developed Gigabit Ethernet products, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996. In 2001, Cheriton and Bechtolsheim founded another start up, Kealia, which was acquired by Sun in 2004. From 1996 to 2003, Bechtolsheim and Cheriton occupied executive positions at Cisco, leading the development of the Catalyst product line, along with Kenneth Duda who had been Granite Systems' first employee.
In 2004, the three then went on to found Arastra. Bechtolsheim and Cheriton were able to fund the company themselves. In May 2008, Jayshree Ullal left Cisco after 15 years at the firm, and was appointed CEO of Arista in October 2008.
In June 2014, Arista Networks had its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ANET.
In December 2014, Cisco filed two lawsuits against Arista alleging intellectual property infringement., and the United States International Trade Commission issued limited exclusion and cease-and-desist orders concerning two of the features patented by Cisco and upheld an import ban on infringing products. In 2016, on appeal, the ban was reversed following product changes and two overturned Cisco patents, and Cisco's claim of damages was ruled against. In August 2018, Arista agreed to pay Cisco as part of a settlement that included a release for all claims of infringement by Cisco, dismissal of Arista's antitrust claims against Cisco, and a 5-year stand-down between the companies.
In August 2018, Arista Networks acquired Mojo Networks.
Arista's CEO, Jayshree Ullal, was named to Barron's list of World's Best CEOs in 2018 and 2019.

Products

Extensible Operating System

EOS is Arista's network operating system, and comes as one image that runs across all Arista devices or in a virtual machine. EOS runs on an unmodified Linux kernel under a Fedora-based userland. There are more than 100 independent regular processes, called agents, responsible for different aspects and features of the switch, including drivers that manage the switching application-specific integrated circuit, the command-line interface, Simple Network Management Protocol, Spanning Tree Protocol, and various routing protocols. All the state of the switch and its various protocols is centralized in another process, called Sysdb. Separating processing from the state gives EOS two important properties. The first is software fault containment, which means that if a software fault occurs, any damage is limited to one agent. The second is stateful restarts, since the state is stored in Sysdb, when an agent restarts it picks up where it left off. Since agents are independent processes, they can also be upgraded while the switch is running.
The fact that EOS runs on Linux allows the usage of common Linux tools on the switch itself, such as tcpdump or configuration management systems. EOS provides extensive application programming interfaces to communicate with and control all aspects of the switch. To showcase EOS' extensibility, Arista developed a module named CloudVision that extends the CLI to use Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol as a shared message bus to manage and configure switches. This was implemented simply by integrating an existing open-source XMPP Python library with the CLI.

Programmability

In addition to all the standard programming and scripting abilities traditionally available in a Linux environment, EOS can be programmed using different mechanisms:
Arista's product line can be separated into different product families:
  1. 7150S series: 1U ultra-low latency cut-through line-rate 10 Gb switches. Port-to-port latency is sub-380ns, regardless of the frame size. Unlike the earlier 7100 series, the switch silicon can be re-programmed to add new features that work at wire-speed, such as Virtual Extensible LAN or network address translation.
The low-latency of Arista switches has made the platform prevalent in high-frequency trading environments, such as the Chicago Board Options Exchange, Lehman Brothers or RBC Capital Markets. As of October 2009, one third of its customers were big Wall Street firms.
Arista's devices are multilayer switches, which support a range of layer 3 protocols, including IGMP, Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol, Routing Information Protocol, Border Gateway Protocol, Open Shortest Path First, IS-IS, and OpenFlow. The switches are also capable of layer 3 or layer 4 equal-cost multi-path routing, and applying per-port L3/L4 access-control lists entirely in hardware.
All of Arista's switches are built using merchant silicon instead of custom switching application-specific integrated circuits. This strategy enables Arista to leverage latest advances in processor manufacturing technology at a lower price, due to the prohibitive costs associated with developing and producing custom chips. Other major competitors such as Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks have also started using the same strategy, which led to multiple competing products built on top of the same chips. For instance Broadcom's Trident chip is used in some Cisco Nexus switches, Juniper QFX switches, Force10, IBM and HP switches. The integration of the chips with the rest of the system, physical layer and software are what differentiate the competing products.
In November 2013, Arista Networks introduced the Spline network, combining leaf and spine architectures into a single-tier network, which aims to cut operating costs.
In September 2015, Arista introduced the series 7060X, 7260X, and 7320X, refreshing then extant series 7050X, 7250X, and 7300X, with new, higher performance 100 GbE options.

Major competitors