Reprint THE CONNECTED ENTERPRISE FEBRUARY 22, 2013 How Arista Networks got out in front of the SDN craze Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal says ‘cloud networking leader’ complements Cisco BY JOHN GALLANT, NETWORK WORLD Arista was able to take advantage of that disruption in hardware. Our top five oday, the buzz in networking is The second is software. We were very differentiators are all all around software-defined net- inspired by Cisco’s software focus on the works — and nothing could make enterprise side, Juniper’s on the service tied to our software.” Arista Networks CEO Jayshree provider side, and we saw that we could — Jayshree Ullal, CEO, Ullal happier. Ullal spent 15 years build a purpose-built, modern operating Arista Networks Tat Cisco, where she ran the network giant’s system only for the data center and the core switching and data center businesses, cloud. We didn’t try to do it for general- before joining Arista, which was founded purpose networking. We really focused on as a cost center, but really build it as a by Sun Microsystems co-founder and Chief our mission, which is high-performance profit center by addressing the applica- System Architect Andy Bechtolsheim and applications for the data center and cloud. tions themselves. We early on entered the David Cheriton, a Stanford University pro- It’s called Extensible Operating System high-frequency trading market to under- fessor of computer science and electrical (EOS) and there is no networking operating stand their trading algorithms, map it to engineering (and fellow Cisco alumnus). system that is as modern, self-healing and the latency requirements. That became an Ullal says Arista’s data center switches were resilient, and [designed for the cloud]. instance of a high-performance financial born to support SDN and provide both the And the third, speaking of that, is the cloud where they started building the net- power and flexibility required for today’s cloud itself. The enterprise market is work for that application separate from the highly virtualized corporate and cloud data shifting. Every CIO is being demanded enterprise network. centers. In this installment of the IDG Enter- a strategy on what they are doing with In Silicon Valley, a large number of Web prise CEO Interview Series, Ullal spoke with the cloud in terms of applications and 2.0 providers, whether they’re search en- Chief Content Officer John Gallant about infrastructure. Whether it’s a private gines or social networking, the kind of scale the reality and hype around SDN, and why cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, they build is just unbelievable. It’s 100,000 the data center requires a different network these are becoming an important piece of nodes, and increasingly, one machine, one than your father’s general-purpose Cisco the strategy. As Amazon innovated on the physical server, is not one node. That’s 20 net. She also explored how her work at Cisco application side, you can think of Arista as virtual machines, which means you could shaped Arista’s strategy, and shared insights really providing that market disruption on be enabling 100,000 physical nodes but on how Arista’s partnerships with VMware the networking side. you are really enabling 1 million virtual and Cloudera are making it easier to move to nodes. There’s huge virtual machine sprawl cloud and embrace big data, respectively. Explain the cloud angle in a little and physical sprawl. The CPU at one point more depth. What were you set- wasn’t being fully utilized. But now, with There are a lot of networking al- ting out to do to support or enable the new multi-core CPUs, the pressure is ternatives out there. Why should cloud? back on the network. That’s why whether someone buy from Arista? More and more people are outsourc- it’s a private or a public cloud, the Web 2.0 Arista saw three disruptions in the ing to modern applications — whether it’s companies are moving massively to high- market: a hardware disruption; a software Salesforce.com or Amazon itself. [They’re density 10G, 40G and 100G [networks] disruption; and a customer buying disrup- supporting] high-performance computing, that are requiring a new type of architec- tion, which in my mind is the most impor- or high-frequency trading or, increasingly ture and new software as well. tant thing. You can invent all you want on now, big data and network virtualization. the technology side, but you have to see the The network infrastructure needs to adapt. What are the things that make you customers changing their market position. It cannot be so monolithic. It cannot be one different than a general-purpose The hardware technology disruption was physical port equals one VLAN equals one networking company like Cisco? that in the 1990s, the only way to build any network switch. It really needs to be much At the highest level I would say our kind of high-speed networking was through more massive in scale. A typical enter- software, our EOS. It’s open, it’s built your own in-house ASICs [application-spe- prise network is a 10,000-node, three-tier out of straight Linux. But then we added cific integrated circuits] and specialty chips. network, and we were able to build a much what we call multi-processing, state- That’s not true anymore. We have from three flatter, fatter topology at Layer 2 and 3, us- oriented software that allows you to do the to five vendors available, whether it’s Intel, ing what we call the leaf-spine architecture kind of things that you could only do in Broadcom or others, supplying us much of that can scale to 50,000 to 100,000 nodes. mainframes and servers. It’s funny how the silicon. They are sometimes an order That was our first premise. hardware changes every 18 months in of magnitude better in power, footprint, The second [thing we focused on] was networking, but software doesn’t change density, latency, and performance and scale. application delays. Don’t build a network for decades and has remained monolithic for so long. Our top five differentiators are problem. We call this “from A to Z analysis.” er guys really like it and other times it’s high- all tied to our software. We can do automation, we can do zero-touch density 10GB. Another application is big The first is that we build, without us- provisioning, we can do a suite of functions data. Storage is no longer just a fibre-channel ing any proprietary components, active/ here because data is coming at such amazing SAN — you will start needing 10GB storage active networks that can scale to 50,000 speeds, structured and unstructured, how for iSCSI or more and more Hadoop clusters and 100,000 nodes. Other companies try do you sort out what’s relevant and how do with direct-attached storage. That becomes to do that with proprietary technologies. you monitor, how do you tap, how do you do another very interesting Arista project. You may be aware of Juniper’s QFabric real-time captures at 10 gigabits and terabits Virtualization, the VM sprawl. Another one or Cisco’s FabricPath and OTV [Overlay when the data is moving so fast? We’re not we’re starting to see more of is huge media Transport Virtualization]. We are able to just building enterprise features. Cisco’s rendering, and video applications that are do it in a standards-based fashion, and ev- done that really well for the last two decades, pushing the envelope of bandwidth. Where ery one of our networks interoperates with that’s their market. But yet if you look at the the application intersects the network is the Cisco routers, Juniper switches, NetScreen way servers are sold today, only half of them common theme through all the projects. firewalls, you name it. are going into an enterprise application. On the other hand, Arista has to walk be- The second is, because of the software, The other half, which are high-performance fore it runs. We’ve been growing at the rate we were able to bring to the data center and computing and Web, are going into the cloud of one new customer a day since we started cloud what we call self-healing resilience. applications. They don’t require traditional shipping. We now have 1,700 customers. Usually, redundancy and resilience means enterprise features. Just like mainframes Deployments usually start small, then they buy two of everything and connect them moved to client server, enterprises are mov- get really fascinated and intrigued and in case one fails. It’s great for the vendor to ing to more HPC and Web, and those fea- appreciative of EOS, and all of its opera- get two of everything. But we were able to tures are much more about reducing OPEX tional advantages, how open it is, how easy do it right in our software. Today, you look and improving the orchestration and traffic it is to use. The training is very easy and at software agents and how they interact. If visibility and data analysis. a Cisco CCIE expert would be able to use you have a memory leak in software today, The fifth and final differentiator is Arista right away, because we have similar and the agents talk to each other in a tradi- network visualization. What VMware did command-line interfaces and operational tional network operating system, they do to servers with server virtualization, we be- look and feel.