A former head of Cisco's switch business, and Sun co-founder, started a new switching startup called Arista Networks. Their motto is "Extensible Operation System for Cloud Networking".
As you can see, "Sun", "Cisco", and "Cloud Networking", are all enough buzz words to grap people's attention, and start writing about the new company.
So, I decided to pay their site a visit in order to see what new technology are these guys offering to the market.
First of all, they have a very limited portfolio, 24 and 48 edge-switches with 10 GbE interfaces. They do not have any modulat chassis-based switches yet, but may be this is because they are just starting up.
They are focusing on their modular OS, but once again Juniper's JunOS for example is modular too, so what is really new in Arista's switches compared to Juniper's EX-Series?!
ISSU (In-service-software-upgrades), which is new for an edge-switch. Many modular switches with redundant Management Modules (
To tell you the truth, I think the main competitive value for Arista Networks, is their prices. I do not know their actual pricing, but it's said that their prices are much lower than the equivalent switches for Cisco for example. But what about HP ProCurve for example, are they cheaper too?
Anyway, it's still good to have more competing companies in the switches market which is dominated by one vendor so far. And analysts usually like to call it, "Cisco and the Seven Dwarfs" market.
Tags: Arista Networks, Cisco, Junipe, HP ProCurve, Foundry Networks, Switches, Gr33n Data
The price per port is under $500. HP has no 10G switches. The optics are $300. So $800 per port for 10G. Cisco is $1000 per port and $1800 for the optics.
ReplyDeleteSo, cheap prices is what Arista's offering here.
ReplyDeleteBut please take into your consideration, that list prices, and prices published online are deceiving. Companies most of the times make huge discounts to win a deal. So try to forget about the prices, especially that the other vendors have total solution and they can bundle multiple devices together and offer some products for free.
It's not -exactly- non-service interrupting on Foundry. But the point is made non-the-less. I need some more hyphen's in this comment. -$-
ReplyDeleteMunpe Q,
ReplyDeleteWhy not? Can't you just upgrade the secondary management module, and then fall back to it once it is upgraded and upgrade the other card?
By the way, take care, we charge people money for hyphens in their comments, you can buy a pack of 10 hyphens for $100.
GD, yes in fact that would be the preferred way, but on all of the Foundry switches that I manage with redundant management modules, failover/failback is not as seamless as it may seem or how other products do it, but it beats not having a management module at all whne the primary fails. Kee-yah! That's hyphen karate, in yo face!
ReplyDeleteOk, you're right, I've just checked that, and it seems that you will need a reboot during the upgrade process.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, may be I gave a wrong example here, but still there are many switches in the market that support ISSU.
Arista is the only 1RU switch capable of low latency (600ns to 1.2 microsec), almost terabit of capacity (960Gbps to be precise), live patching,fault containment and repair and ISSU never seen in anything but Modular expensive systems before, and a next gen OS capable of open extensiblity to mgmt and apps. Their price points are 1/5th to 1/10th and rich Layer 2/3 features. EOS is a ground up architecture and third gen, a step beyond JUNOs, IOS, old HP OS in fine grained modularity. The SYSDB state separation is really modern!
ReplyDeleteCloud Computing, Storage Consolodation , Large Data/Web, Video/Content are all immediate used cases...plus the advent of VM sprawl creates the need for large L2 clouds at 1/10GE
The managment team is impressive which only means theres more to come and company will be well funded and managed also.
Its about time the industry had some alternatives to stodgy networking solutions with high margins.
Welcome to the party Arista!
Hi:
ReplyDeletei know that its off topic, but in the blog you said "people behind them are buzz-magnets",
i would like to know what do you think about PaloAlto Networks of Nir Zuk, he was in Juniper Networks and the Application firewall looks as JN FW+IDP+basicUAC.
Might be other blog thread: "App Firewall and Juniper Networks".
thanks your time.
Victor
what do you mean with buzz magnet people? I can't understand it at all.
ReplyDeleteIndeed their prices are very good, and they have some amazing workers that do amazing things.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like a great idea, and you are right in the point where are people who just attracts business.
ReplyDelete