Arista Networks

Arista Networks
Public
Traded as NYSE: ANET
Industry Networking hardware, Cloud Networking
Founded October 2004
Headquarters Santa Clara, California, USA
Key people
 Jayshree Ullal, CEO,
Andy Bechtolsheim, CDO & Chairman,
Kenneth Duda, CTO,
Ita Brennan, CFO
Products Network switches, software
Revenue Increase US$ 584 million (2014)[1]
Increase US$ 126 million (2014)[1]
Increase US$ 87 million (2014)[1]
Total assets Increase US$ 811 million (2014)[1]
Total equity Increase US$ 556 million (2014)[1]
Website www.arista.com

Arista Networks (previously Arastra[2]) is a computer networking company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA. The company designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking (SDN) solutions for large datacenter, cloud computing, high-performance computing and high-frequency trading environments. Arista's products include an array of 10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet low-latency cut-through switches, including the 7124SX,[3] which remained the fastest switch[4] using SFP+ optics through September 2012,[5] with its sub-500ns latency, as well as the 7500 series, Arista’s award-winning[6] modular 10G/40G/100Gbit/s switch. Arista's own Linux-based network operating system, EOS (Extensible Operating System), runs on all Arista products.

Corporate history

Andy Bechtolsheim co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. In 1995, David Cheriton co-founded Granite Systems with Bechtolsheim, a company that developed Gigabit Ethernet products, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996.[7] In 2001, Cheriton and Bechtolsheim founded another start up, Kealia,[8] 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.[9]

In 2004, the three then went on to found Arastra (later renamed Arista[2]). Bechtolsheim and Cheriton were able to fund the company themselves.[10] In May 2008, Jayshree Ullal left Cisco after 15 years at the company, and was appointed CEO of Arista in October 2008.[11]

In June 2014, Arista Networks had its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ANET.[12]

In December 2014, Cisco filed two lawsuits against Arista alleging extensive intellectual property infringement.[13]

Products

Extensible Operating System

EOS is Arista's network operating system, and comes as a single image that runs across all Arista devices[14] or in a virtual machine.[15] EOS runs on an unmodified Linux kernel under a Fedora-based userland.[16] 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 ASICs, the CLI, SNMP, 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 (carried by the agents) from the state (in Sysdb) gives EOS two important properties. The first is software fault containment, which means that if a software fault occurs, the damage is limited to a single agent.[17][18] The second is stateful restarts, since the state is stored in Sysdb, when an agent restarts it picks up where it left off.[18] Since agents are independent processes, they can also be upgraded while the switch is running (a feature called ISSU – In-Service Software Upgrade).

The fact that EOS runs on Linux allows the usage of common Linux tools on the switch itself, such as tcpdump or usual configuration management systems. EOS provides extensive APIs to communicate with and control all aspects of the switch. To showcase EOS' extensibility, Arista developed a module dubbed CloudVision[19] that extends the CLI to use XMPP as a shared message bus for managing and configuring switches.[20] 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 capabilities traditionally available in a Linux environment, EOS can be programmed using different mechanisms:

Ethernet switches

Arista's product line can be separated in eight families:

  1. 7500E series: Modular chassis with a VOQ fabric supporting up to 4 or 8 store and forward line cards delivering line-rate non-blocking 10GbE, 40GbE, and 100GbE[24] performance in a 30Tbit/s fabric supporting a maximum of 1152 10GbE ports with 144GB of packet buffer. Each 100GbE ports can also operate as 3x40G or 12x10G ports,[25] thus effectively providing 120Gb of line-rate capacity per port.
  2. 7300 series: Modular chassis with 4, 8, or 16 line cards with 2.56Tbit/s of capacity per line card, for a fabric totaling up to 40Tbit/s of capacity for up to 2048 10GbE ports.[26] Unlike the 7500 series, 10GBASE-T is available on 7300 series line cards.
  3. 7200 series: 2U low-latency high-density line-rate 40GbE switches, with 5.12Tbit/s of forwarding capacity.[27]
  4. 7100 series: 1U ultra-low latency cut-through line-rate 10Gb switches. The 7124SX has a sub 500ns port-to-port latency, regardless of the frame size.[4]
  5. 7150 series: 1U ultra-low latency cut-through line-rate 10Gb switches. Port-to-port latency is sub-380ns, regardless of the frame size.[30] Unlike the 7100 series, the switch silicon can be re-programmed[31] to add new features that work at wire-speed, such as VXLAN or NAT/PAT.
  6. 7050 series: 1U low-latency cut-through line-rate 10Gb and 40Gb switches. This product line offers a higher port density than the 7100 series, with a minimum of 52 x 10GbE ports, at the expense of slightly increased latency (1.2µs or less).
  7. 7048 series: 1U store and forward line-rate 1Gb top-of-rack switch, with 4x10Gb uplinks. These switches use a Deep Buffer architecture, with 768MB of packet memory.
  8. 7010 series: 1U low power (52W) line-rate 1Gb top-of-rack switch, with 4x10Gb uplinks.[32]

The low-latency of Arista switches has made the platform prevalent in high-frequency trading environments, such as the Chicago Board Options Exchange[33] (largest U.S. options exchange), Lehman Brothers[34] or RBC Capital Markets.[35] As of October 2009, one third of its customers were big Wall Street firms.[36]

Arista's devices are multilayer switches, which support a range of layer 3 protocols,[37] including IGMP, VRRP, RIP, BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, as well as OpenFlow. The switches are also capable of layer 3 or layer 4 ECMP, and applying per-port L3/L4 ACLs entirely in hardware.

All of Arista's switches are built using merchant silicon instead of custom switching ASICs. This strategy enables Arista to leverage latest advances in processor manufacturing technology at a lower price point, due to the prohibitive costs associated with the development and production of custom chips. Other major competitors such as Cisco and Juniper have also started following the same strategy,[38] 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.[39] The integration of the chips with the rest of the system (including integration with the MAC, PHY, and device drivers on the control plane) 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 operational costs.[40]

Major competitors

  1. Brocade Communications Systems
  2. Cisco Systems
  3. Extreme Networks
  4. Juniper Networks

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "Arista Networks, Inc. 2014 Annual Report Form (10-K)". United States Securities and Exchange Commission. May 5, 2015.
  2. 1 2 "Arastra Starts with a Name Changer, Aims for a Game Changer". HPCwire. 23 October 2008. Retrieved 16 October 2011.
  3. ↑ "Arista Advances Race to Zero with Sub 500 Nanosecond Latency Switch" (Press release). Arista Networks. 15 March 2011. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
  4. 1 2 "Arista, Blade win top spot in data center switch test". Network World, Inc. 18 January 2010. Retrieved 16 October 2011.
  5. ↑ "Cisco looks to one-up Arista, Juniper with Nexus 3548". InformationWeek. 19 September 2012. Retrieved 10 April 2013.
  6. ↑ "Interop 2010 Show Winners". InformationWeek. 28 April 2010. Retrieved 22 July 2012.
  7. ↑ "Cisco buys Granite Systems". CNET News. 3 September 1996. Retrieved 16 October 2011.
  8. ↑ "Cisco's Brain Drain Continues". CNET News. 16 December 2003. Retrieved 16 October 2011.
  9. ↑ "Management Team". Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  10. ↑ "10 start-ups to watch in '09". Network World, Inc. 5 January 2009. Retrieved 16 October 2011. Funding: Undisclosed amount from Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton
  11. ↑ "Arista Networks Names Jayshree Ullal President and CEO, Andreas Bechtolsheim CDO and Chairman" (Press release). Arista Networks. 23 October 2008. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  12. ↑ "Arista Networks crushes IPO targets, soars after raising $226M". Silicon Valley Business Journal. 5 June 2014. Retrieved 25 September 2014.
  13. ↑ "Cisco Sues Arista, a Rival Run by Former Cisco Employees". Business Insider. 5 December 2014. Retrieved 8 December 2014.
  14. ↑ "Arista EOS : Key Features". Retrieved 12 June 2014. EOS provides a single binary image across all Arista networking platforms
  15. ↑ "vEOS – Running EOS in a VM". Arista Networks. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  16. ↑ "Using tcpdump for troubleshooting". 16 June 2011. Retrieved 12 June 2014. Linux Fedora 12 as the foundation upon which the Arista EOS is built
  17. ↑ "The Joy of an Open Switch Operating System". 1 May 2011. Retrieved 8 November 2011. Kill agents and watch them restart to see if EOS is as resilient as we say it is.
  18. 1 2 "Extensible Modular Operating System". Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  19. ↑ "CloudVision™ – Topology Agnostic Management for Cloud Data Centers". Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  20. ↑ "CloudVision Multi-Switch CLI – Network Management over XMPP". 23 August 2011. Retrieved 16 October 2011.
  21. ↑ "Advanced Event Management (AEM)". Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  22. ↑ Donahue, Gary (24 October 2012). "Chapter 27: Event Monitor". Arista Warrior. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-1-4493-1453-8. Retrieved 2 February 2014.
  23. ↑ "eAPI: Learning the basics". Retrieved 2 February 2014.
  24. ↑ "Arista 7500 Series". Retrieved 12 June 2014. Line Rate 10GbE/40GbE/100GbE interfaces
  25. ↑ "Arista Introduces The Industry’s Fastest Data Center Switch" (Press release). Arista Networks. 1 May 2013. Retrieved 12 June 2014. triple-speed 10/40/100G line card with integrated MXP (multi-speed-port) optics that can be software configured on a per port basis
  26. ↑ "Arista 7300 Technical Architecture". Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  27. ↑ "Arista 7200 Series". Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  28. ↑ "7124FX Application Switch". Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  29. ↑ "How Low Can You Go? Argon Design Reduces HFT Latency to 176ns, Close to the Theoretical Limit". Forex Magnates. 1 October 2013. Retrieved 27 October 2013.
  30. ↑ "7150 Series 1/10 GbE SFP Ultra-Low Latency Switch". Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  31. ↑ "Arista 7150S Series: Q&A" (PDF). Retrieved 12 June 2014. a flexible programmable pipeline that enables new features like VXLAN to be rapidly released
  32. ↑ "High Performance and Power Efficient Data Center Gigabit Ethernet Switch". Retrieved 8 August 2015.
  33. ↑ "Arista Networks Celebrates 1000 Customers Worldwide" (Press release). Arista Networks. 11 October 2011. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  34. ↑ "Names You Need To Know: Arista Networks". Forbes. 5 February 2011. Retrieved 16 October 2011. Lehman brothers its first customer
  35. ↑ "RBC Capital Markets bets on Solace and Arista". 14 December 2010. Retrieved 16 October 2011.
  36. ↑ "Gunning for an Elephant in Silicon Valley". Bloomberg. 19 October 2009. Retrieved 16 October 2011. A third of its customers are big Wall Street firms looking for faster computing systems and speedier execution of trades.
  37. ↑ "Supported Features in EOS". Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  38. ↑ "Cisco's 'Jawbreaker' seen as response to competitive pressure". Network World, Inc. 10 March 2011. Retrieved 29 September 2012. But basing any product on merchant silicon is a "huge departure" for Cisco
  39. ↑ "Merchant Silicon and Vendor Software – The Hype in 2012". EtherealMind / Greg Ferro. 6 January 2012. Retrieved 29 September 2012. Even Cisco [...] has a Broadcom Trident chipset in their Cisco Nexus 3000 product
  40. ↑ "Arista Unveils Single-Tier Ethernet Switches". Network Computing. 4 November 2013. Retrieved 3 December 2013. Arista calls the new devices "spline" switches, meaning they can be deployed in a single-tier network of up to 2,000 servers

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