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.