Since its founding in 2004, it’s arguable that no network vendor has made better switches than Arista Networks Inc. That was true then and remains true, as its prowess in this area helped it ride the cloud boom and the artificial intelligence wave. That model is changing as AI scales. Today, ahead of next week’s Open Compute Project Global Summit in San Jose, Arista announced an expansion of its AI network strategy from switches to rack scale.
The networking industry loves inflection points. Over the years, we have had many new compute models that require the network to evolve. For as long as I can remember, the holy war between InfiniBand and Ethernet was fought on a relatively simple battlefield: throughput versus ubiquity. But as artificial intelligence workloads scale from tens of thousands of processors to massive clusters approaching the million-graphics-processing-unit mark, the network is fundamentally changing. It is no longer just a standalone infrastructure layer; it has become the critical backplane of a tightly integrated AI supersystem.
High-performance network provider Arista Networks Inc. today announced the next wave of innovations for its campus network solutions. The new products include expansion of its Virtual ES with Path Aliasing, or VESPA, offering, which will make it easier for businesses to deploy large-scale mobility domains. The Santa Clara networking company also announced it is expanding its Autonomous Virtual Assistant, or AVA, its agentic artificial intelligence solution, to help organizations streamline AI operations use cases.
Scaling artificial intelligence is not just a compute problem but increasingly a network issue, a reality that Arista Networks addressed Wednesday by unveiling its latest switch family targeted toward AI data centers. It’s new generation, the R4 Series platform is based on the Broadcom Jericho3 Qumran3D silicon and is designed for AI, cloud data centers and routed backbone deployments.
Arista Networks Inc. today announced it will acquire VeloCloud SD-WAN from Broadcom Inc., a deal that puts to bed ongoing reports that surfaced about six weeks ago. The purchase, for which a price wasn’t given but was reportedly about $1 billion, gives Arista a best-in-class software-defined wide-area network solution to complement its current high-end 7000 series router which run the Cloud EOS operating system. VeloCloud has a wide range of cloud-managed SD-WAN offerings with integrated security enabling Arista to reach another tier of customer.