Jayshree Ullal

Author Archives: Jayshree Ullal

The Modern Healthcare Enterprise

Until now the intersection of human healthcare and networking machines was somewhat loosely coupled. Healthcare has been historically stymied by regulations and compliance issues making the adoption of modern IT challenging. Yet today in a quest for longer and healthier lives we are driven by metrics to monitor our health, measure continuous feedback of our heart, breathing and track our physical activity and exercise. Digital healthcare is impacting the continuum of patient care and the overall patient experience, generating exponential increases in data, and creating unprecedented demand for increased network speeds and agility. Just as the financial industry took to modernizing real time banking, the time has arrived to leverage the power of the network to modernize healthcare.

Tech Time is Real Time

Silicon Valley is both an addiction and passion where entrepreneurs seek the realm of the impossible. Real-time language translation, fraud detection, and autonomous vehicle control are being addressed through the use of neural network models, detecting patterns and behaviors across massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. Indeed, change is not only a constant progression in Silicon Valley, it is a continuum in time. Every piece of traditional technology has to imminently become smarter, challenged or be eliminated. While this transformation is especially true for entrepreneurs, invention is not limited to start-ups. I have witnessed several waves of evolution and revolution during my journey in Silicon Valley in both high-tech and networking.

Cognitive Campus – Next Frontier

Arista’s focus on disruption, with datacenters and routing, transforming siloed places in the network to seamless Places In the Cloud (PICs) has been well appreciated by our customers. Our cloud networking decade has been achieved by upholding these cloud principles and I believe these trends will influence cognitive campus PICs. Legacy campus networks suffer from a similar complexity of too many layers, boxes, cables, operating systems, proprietary features and network management choices. A change is very much needed and welcome in the 2020 era.

Reflections on the Cloud Networking Decade

When I joined Arista ten years ago, we were in the midst of developing a novel purpose-built software architecture from a clean sheet of paper for networking. The financial services industry was in crisis, with the collapse of major banks like Lehman Brothers. In parallel, emerging slowly but surely, was a new breed of hyper-scale cloud operators. Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google GCP were in the early stages of shaping what was to become the public cloud. The requirements of these new titans provided a source of inspiration for the Arista founders and me. We couldn’t have predicted the pace nor the impact of this cloud fury; it came strongly and rapidly. As I reminisce over the past decade, it is clear that the cloud inflection has forever changed the face of enterprise IT for the better. Yet it is just the beginning, and there is much ahead.

Rethinking Security in Cloud Networking

Every CXO worries about security because the perimeter is changing; in fact, there are no walls for protection. The lines between cloud, workloads, applications, enterprise networks and hosts are blurring and the challenges are getting exponentially greater. The true security architect must rapidly address the reality of a more holistic network-wide security strategy. It must be one that goes beyond the cyber threat of the day to address the risk, scale and mitigation of persistent security issues. The state of cyber security needs urgent resolution because:

Rethinking Security in Cloud Networking

Every CXO worries about security because the perimeter is changing; in fact, there are no walls for protection. The lines between cloud, workloads, applications, enterprise networks and hosts are blurring and the challenges are getting exponentially greater. The true security architect must rapidly address the reality of a more holistic network-wide security strategy. It must be one that goes beyond the cyber threat of the day to address the risk, scale and mitigation of persistent security issues. The state of cyber security needs urgent resolution because:

The Pursuit of Inspired Leadership

At Arista Networks, great technology and leadership inspires us to innovate and continue our mission to reinvent. It’s an ongoing journey to create the right leaders and disruptive technology for market transitions and Arista’s evolution. Today I digress a bit, as I was reading a 2017 Harvard Business Review article on the four key traits identified for successful CEOs. So much of it resonated with me with respect to the Arista way and our company culture. Let’s review how these traits apply to a fast-paced technology company like Arista.

The Pursuit of Inspired Leadership

At Arista Networks, great technology and leadership inspires us to innovate and continue our mission to reinvent. It’s an ongoing journey to create the right leaders and disruptive technology for market transitions and Arista’s evolution. Today I digress a bit, as I was reading a 2017 Harvard Business Review article on the four key traits identified for successful CEOs. So much of it resonated with me with respect to the Arista way and our company culture. Let’s review how these traits apply to a fast-paced technology company like Arista.

Universal Cloud Networking with Arista 7170

There is a shift happening in the world of Artificial Intelligence requiring a new breed of servers, storage and cloud networks. Artificial intelligence applications for patterns, photos and speech recognition have driven a processor evolution from CPUs to NPUs to now, GPUs. Networking is witnessing a parallel evolution and pushing the scale of shuttling massive data between machines. It creates an ever-increasing need for control over the way networks are rebuilt. Building these networks requires both, programmable paths to drive intelligence and uncompromised performance. Doing both hasn’t been easy until now.

Universal Cloud Networking with Arista 7170

There is a shift happening in the world of Artificial Intelligence requiring a new breed of servers, storage and cloud networks. Artificial intelligence applications for patterns, photos and speech recognition have driven a processor evolution from CPUs to NPUs to now, GPUs. Networking is witnessing a parallel evolution and pushing the scale of shuttling massive data between machines. It creates an ever-increasing need for control over the way networks are rebuilt. Building these networks requires both, programmable paths to drive intelligence and uncompromised performance. Doing both hasn’t been easy until now.

Unveiling Cognitive Campus Networking

At Arista Networks, the status quo inspires us to innovate and continue our mission to reinvent the network – from ­­cloud to client. Today, we’re continuing that journey – into the campus network. Let’s face it; the legacy three-tier architecture of access-aggregation-core is wasteful and oversubscribed – creating a perfect storm for market transitions and Arista innovation.

Unveiling Cognitive Campus Networking

At Arista Networks, the status quo inspires us to innovate and continue our mission to reinvent the network – from ­­cloud to client. Today, we’re continuing that journey – into the campus network. Let’s face it; the legacy three-tier architecture of access-aggregation-core is wasteful and oversubscribed – creating a perfect storm for market transitions and Arista innovation.

Cognitive Cloud Networking with Arista X3 Series

At Arista we have always embraced open networking trends by designing our hardware and software to be as programmable as possible, driving the use of merchant silicon and diversity for the broader industry. It has allowed our customers to select their favorite silicon architectures for the switch pipeline and choose the suite of software and hardware they want to form their cognitive network systems. 

Cognitive Cloud Networking with Arista X3 Series

At Arista we have always embraced open networking trends by designing our hardware and software to be as programmable as possible, driving the use of merchant silicon and diversity for the broader industry. It has allowed our customers to select their favorite silicon architectures for the switch pipeline and choose the suite of software and hardware they want to form their cognitive network systems. 

The Future of Cognitive Cloud Networking

Artificial Intelligence, machine and deep learning have to be among the most popular tech-words of the past few years, and I was hoping that I wouldn’t get swept away by it. But when I heard a panel on this topic at our customer event this month on the state of AI networks, I found it incredibly fascinating and it piqued my curiosity! Let me start with a note of disclaimer for readers who are expecting a deep tutorial from me. There is a vast amount of research behind models and algorithms on this topic that I will not even attempt to cover. Instead I will try to share some thoughts on the practical relevance of this promising field.

The Future of Cognitive Cloud Networking

Artificial Intelligence, machine and deep learning have to be among the most popular tech-words of the past few years, and I was hoping that I wouldn’t get swept away by it. But when I heard a panel on this topic at our customer event this month on the state of AI networks, I found it incredibly fascinating and it piqued my curiosity! Let me start with a note of disclaimer for readers who are expecting a deep tutorial from me. There is a vast amount of research behind models and algorithms on this topic that I will not even attempt to cover. Instead I will try to share some thoughts on the practical relevance of this promising field.

Good to Great: Hallmarks of High-Tech Leadership

You are probably expecting me to write another monthly blog on exciting innovative technology. Today I digress and reflect on recent awards and accolades Arista has received and how we got here. At Arista, we have worked very hard to become a great company. Building a good company takes constant hard work and heavy lifting. Making a great company is an even harder work-in-progress, demanding tenacity, especially in high technology, where disruptions are daunting and challenges are frequent. 

Good to Great: Hallmarks of High-Tech Leadership

You are probably expecting me to write another monthly blog on exciting innovative technology. Today I digress and reflect on recent awards and accolades Arista has received and how we got here. At Arista, we have worked very hard to become a great company. Building a good company takes constant hard work and heavy lifting. Making a great company is an even harder work-in-progress, demanding tenacity, especially in high technology, where disruptions are daunting and challenges are frequent. 

Arista Any Cloud Networking – Our Next Frontier

The modern cloud networking world is vastly different from traditional enterprise IT, and the gap is getting wider everyday. How does one truly scale across millions of machines and workloads globally? A decade ago, Arista pioneered the new software driven networking era and the same challenges now exist not only across the LAN intra-datacenters but also inter-datacenters via wide area networks (WANS). Although we have never promoted “SD-LAN” nor understood the “SD-WAN” hype, Arista has redefined software driven networking and pioneered the convergence between LANs and WANS.

Arista Any Cloud Networking – Our Next Frontier

The modern cloud networking world is vastly different from traditional enterprise IT, and the gap is getting wider everyday. How does one truly scale across millions of machines and workloads globally? A decade ago, Arista pioneered the new software driven networking era and the same challenges now exist not only across the LAN intra-datacenters but also inter-datacenters via wide area networks (WANS). Although we have never promoted “SD-LAN” nor understood the “SD-WAN” hype, Arista has redefined software driven networking and pioneered the convergence between LANs and WANS.