Arista Networks
More info
- Creator
- Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, Kenneth Duda
- Released
- 2004
- Type
- Networking company
The switch maker that took data centres away from Cisco using off-the-shelf chips and a Linux that was actually Linux.
Founded in 2004 as Arastra by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Stanford professor David Cheriton and Kenneth Duda. Jayshree Ullal left Cisco to become CEO in 2008. The bet was to buy switching silicon from Broadcom rather than design custom ASICs, and compete on software instead. That software, EOS, keeps all state in a central database, so any process can restart without dropping traffic.
The hyperscalers bought in, and Arista went public in 2014. Cisco sued the same year, claiming the Arista CLI had been copied. The fight ended in 2018 with Arista paying $400 million, which did not stop it from later becoming a key supplier of networking for AI clusters.