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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The last 40 years have seen tremendous growth and progress in the data networking industry. Ethernet, IP, MPLS, GRE, IPsec, MACsec, and VXLAN enable operators to build secure, multiservice, high-performance data planes that interoperate across multiple vendors, multiple operators, and multiple administrative domains. Likewise, BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, LDP, RSVP, BFD, LACP, L3VPN, VPLS, and EVPN enable operators to build scalable multi-vendor control planes that federate across organizational boundaries, supporting mission-critical networks with global reach.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The broad adoption of Arista’s 100G spines and the enthusiastic acceptance of Arista’s R series exemplifies the demands of cloud networking. Leveraging the programmable, state-based EOS software foundation and 12 different merchant silicon chipsets, Arista has transformed the datacenter market over the past decade. Today we are introducing the next frontier in router migration for the decade ahead. Arista has been in the forefront of industry firsts with state driven programmable EOS and CloudVision, based on network wide cloud-class control and management.