What do you get when you combine chocolate and peanut butter? A delicious combo worthy of the best dessert sinner. What do you get when you combine the industry’s top heavy hitters to lead a company of unsurpassed technology? A competitor killer. Also known as Arista Networks, the “Glamour Startup” of Silicon Valley and NetApp’s Advantage Alliance Partner. The recipe for a pseudo Reese’s cup may be simple, but the ingredients that have made Arista an even more complimentary combination is its stellar leadership team, engineering, and best of breed 10 GbE technology, which now even allows you to bridge not only physical, but also virtual and cloud networks . You’ve got Andy Bechtolsheim, Jayshree Ullal – and a list of other stellar rock stars that keep wowing us in the networking industry. Well... now they’ve done it again.
In order to address
the growing challenges of managing virtual and physical infrastructures with
multiple network operating systems, our strong partner, Arista Networks has developed the first
management system to bridge physical, virtual and cloud networks. With this solution, network administrators now
have the ability to treat existing Virtual Distributed Switches as an extension
of the physical network and manage them with industry standard CLI and SNMP
while at the same time relieving the burden of network configuration from VM
host administrators.
This is HUGE and
will be one of the most significant solutions in the virtual/cloud space given
that one of the biggest networking challenges with server virtualization is the
management of virtualized network and security profiles along with VM
configurations as they migrate across physical hosts. Achieving this in a way that scales is very difficult
and usually ends up with enterprises to take their server virtualization
efforts beyond server consolidation and into dynamic resource allocation. Now, Arista has solved this problem… and very
elegantly and cost-effectively, I might add.
vEOS (virtualized Extensible Operating
System) is an integrated networking software that peers with VMware’s vSphere
to link physical and virtual machines to network policy and profiles. With
vEOS, IT organizations can now move applications from physical servers to
virtual machines and to cloud infrastructures while maintaining segmentation,
trust boundaries, and policy. vEOS is a
single system image that runs on the Arista 7000 Family of switches or as a
VMware virtual appliance running on any host.
It is an implementation of Arista EOS that manages VMware vNetwork
Distributed Switches (vDS). vEOS also provides an industry-standard and familiar network interface to the
administrator for
configuration and monitoring, without disrupting the
virtualized infrastructure.
NetApp
believes that since there are numerous elements that must come together to
create a cloud infrastructure, no single vendor is able to adequately address every
single layer. This is why it’s vital
that customers identify the right partners that can provide the services,
technology, and integration necessary for their unique cloud needs. We have some best-of-breed partners that not
only help our customers, but also help validate our technology offering for the
cloud. NetApp
has long been a Cloud Enabler and
with Arista being a Advantage Alliance Partner of ours, I am very excited to
see how their vEOS will help enable NetApp to continue as a leader in this
space. I feel this is especially evident
given the fact that we have two very strong common partners – VMware and
Citrix.
“With
VMware® vSphere™ 4 and NetApp storage technologies, enterprises can build and
operate a virtualized, services-based data center to more rapidly address
changes in business requirements, meet the demand for 24x7 business resiliency,
and drastically reduce costs. VMware vSphere 4 allows IT to virtualize and
allocate resources on demand and complements the special cloud benefits of
NetApp storage. VMware and NetApp together help enable the next generation of
flexible, reliable enterprise IT services with the efficiency, control, and
choice that cloud computing offers.” - Parag Patel, vice president, Alliances, for
VMware
"Customers like the
idea of seamlessly managing their heterogeneous datacenter environments. The
new Arista vEOS complements VMware vSphere 4 and existing management frameworks
so that customers can move workloads across mixed deployments without the headache
of manual configurations" - Shekar Ayyar, Vice President,
Infrastructure Alliances, VMware.
“Citrix
Cloud Center (C3) integrated with NetApp storage systems provides cloud
providers with a robust platform for delivering infrastructure as a service. As
the foundation for Citrix C3, XenServer and Citrix Essentials enable cloud
service providers to seamlessly leverage the advanced NetApp storage
capabilities across their cloud platform, reducing the time and cost to deploy
highly scalable and elastic services.” - Frank Artale, vice
president of business development for Citrix Systems, Inc.
"We are excited to
be working with Arista Networks to define important, emerging standards for
cloud networking solutions. NetScaler VPX is a revolutionary technology
enabling critical application delivery services to be deployed throughout
datacenter and cloud networks." -Klaus Oestermann, Vice
President & General Manager, NetScaler Product Group, Citrix Systems.
So, Arista’s done it again with adding another
component to their best-of-breed products and you can be sure that I’ll be
following how well this is going to be deployed and received in the industry
just as soon as they start their Open Beta program in October/November 2009.
Is your head in the clouds like mine? If so, visit NetApp to float some of your own ideas.
