Arista -- Cloud Networking

Concurrently with PDC (and we would guess coincidentally with), Andy Bechtolsheim's 10G switch company reorganized, renamed and repositioned (might as well get it all out at the same time). The big news of the reorganization was that Jayshree Ullal, most recently SVP of the Cisco data center networking efforts was named as president and CEO. It's a big win for Arista, and lets Andy focus more of his effort on the product, his passion. Arista used to be Arastra. Both names apparently have meaning for people more erudite and educated than me. Arista is thought to be simpler and easier to remember. I'll continue to think of this as "Andy B's company" (and now Jayshree's as well). I don't really care what they call it (nor do their customers I suspect). Finally, Arista positioned itself at the center of Cloud Networking, a nice story since it emphasizes the performance, space, cost and power elegance in the switch and delays the time when Arista will get sucked down into the morass of details and compatibilities that characterizes traditional networking. As we've noted before, for those who quickly recognize Andy's fingerprints, Arista is quite different since it fastidiously avoids custom parts and builds upon standard vendor parts. This time around it's all about software (in addition to the small, low-power and fast elegance of the box). Arista thinks that they can advance the state of the art in networking software as significantly as Juniper did with JunOS compared to Cisco's IOS of the time. Arista's EOS strives to be better in the important dimensions of manageability, availability (upgrade without disruption; few failures can bring down the switch) and maybe most uniquely the extensibility of the software. Andy's fellow traveler (and investor) in Arista is long term entrepreneurial partner David Cheriton, a system expert and professor at Stanford. Arista is Andy and David's Nth joint startup, and a lot of Arista core engineers are also repeat offenders. The team certainly understands software academically and understands commercial networking software in detail. If history is meaningful it's a good bet that Arista will succeed. My key question is just how flexible the extensible software is, and how far that goes optimizing important switch use cases. Time should tell.