| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Networking hardware |
| Founded | October 2004 |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, California, USA |
| Key people | Jayshree Ullal, CEO, Andy Bechtolsheim, Chairman, David Cheriton, Chief Scientist, Kenneth Duda, CTO |
| Products | Switches |
| Website | www.aristanetworks.com |
Arista Networks (previously Arastra[1]) is a computer networking company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA. The company designs and sells network switches for datacenter, high-performance computing and high-frequency trading environments. Arista's products include an array of 10 Gigabit Ethernet low-latency cut-through switches, including the 7124SX,[2] which is currently the fastest switch[3] using SFP+ optics with its sub-500ns latency. Arista's own Linux-based network operating system, EOS (Extensible OS), runs on all Arista products.
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Andy Bechtolsheim co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. In 1995, David Cheriton co-founded founded Granite Systems with Bechtolsheim, a company that developed gigabit Ethernet products, which then got acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996.[4] In 1998, Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page met with Bechtolsheim on Cheriton's front porch. At the meeting, Bechtolsheim gave them their first cheque to fund their company, Google, and Cheriton matched the investment.[5] In 2001, Cheriton and Bechtolsheim founded another start up, Kealia,[6] 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.[7]
In 2004, the three then went on to found Arastra (later renamed Arista[1]). Thanks to a good investment in Google, Bechtolsheim and Cheriton were able to fund the company themselves.[8] In May 2008, Jayshree Ullal left Cisco after 15 years at the company, and was appointed CEO of Arista in October 2008.[9]
EOS is Arista's single network operating system. EOS runs in an unmodified Linux kernel and in a Fedora-based userland.[10] More than 40 independent regular processes, called agents, are responsible for different aspects and features of the switch, such drivers that manage the switching ASICs, the CLI, SNMP, Spanning Tree Protocol, or 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 when a software fault occurs, the damage is limited to a single agent.[11][12] The second is stateful restarts, since the state is stored in Sysdb, when an agent restarts it picks up where it left off.[12] 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 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. As a matter of fact, its CLI is a collection of Python scripts that simply call into these APIs, while offering a so-called industry standard CLI that resembles IOS'. To showcase EOS' extensibility, Arista developed a module that extends the CLI to use XMPP as a shared message bus for managing and configuring switches.[13] This was implemented simply by integrating an existing open-source XMPP Python library with the CLI.
Arista's product line can be separated in four groups:
The low-latency of Arista switches has made the platform prevalent in high-frequency trading environments, such as the Chicago Board Options Exchange[15] (largest U.S. options exchange), Lehman Brothers[16] or RBC Capital Markets.[17] As of October 2009, one third of its customers were big Wall Street firms.[18]
Although Arista's devices are switches, they also support a range of layer 3 protocols, such as IGMP, RIP or BGP. Other routing protocols supported include OSPF, IS-IS and, once the standard is ratified, TRILL. The switches are also capable of doing layer 3 or layer 4 ECMP, and applying per-port L3/L4 ACLs, entirely in hardware.