Arista Networks

Startup Arista Networks' executive team reads like Cisco Systems' Hall of Fame: Chief executive Jayshree Ullal was an 15-year veteran, building the biggest networking switches. Chief scientist David Cheriton advised Cisco for seven years, during teaching at Stanford. Product development head Andreas Bechtolsheim developed some of Cisco's fastest switches. He as well cofounded Sun Microsystems, and was Google's first big backer. The other five top executives all spent time at Cisco, too.

Arista's goal is beat Cisco, and fast-moving incumbent Juniper Networks, by running the Internet at a whole new speed and scale. Current products shift bits in less than 500 nanoseconds - about four times faster than a Cisco product, and twice as fast as Juniper's fastest switch. Energy consumption is anywhere from one-quarter to one-twentieth the competition, thanks to Bechtolsheim's clever engineering of existing commercial chips, and a Linux based large-scale operating system that Cheriton has been working on since 2004.

Most interesting like as not is that Arista is as well the first new hardware company to come up in the new age of mighty data centers - the buildings owned by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, EBay ATT, Verizon and others that house at times 1 million or more computer servers. These data centers handle the public traffic of the Internet, and an increasing amount of private corporate traffic, communicating with each other to carry out some complex computations. The legacy companies like Cisco, Juniper, Brocade and others handle this, however they've all had to learn new tricks to make their old code work so then.

The world's top 100 financial traders

Arista's first clients were the world's top 100 financial traders, who value speed above anything. It debuted in 2008, with Lehman brothers its first customer, and after all managed to make sales. In the past year Arista has added 700 more buyers, in search, social networking, online retail and remote-access cloud computing, which uses the Internet to create and lease supercomputer systems on the fly. Ullal has cultivated deep relationships with virtualization company VMWare, another company that grew up in the era of big data centers, and has its own vision of running an operating system with the management software to run entire data centers.

Arista is raising the stakes with its own large computing project, which will bring to light the hardware management software that Cheriton has been working on since 2004. Part of the project will be the management of large numbers of servers, nevertheless also services open to independent developers interested in building new projects and businesses on Arista systems. "We will have a portal, so Wall Street can find any latency in their trading, or biological sciences can write specialty applications for gene analysis" by accessing the service, Ullal says.

Alternative to Cisco in the data center

There’s an alternative to Cisco in the data center, it’s called the Arista Networks 7500 series modular 10Gb ethernet switching platform. A fully configured system is available at less than $1,200 per wirespeed port.

As the SF-based National Editor at Forbes, I write a lot about tech, nevertheless am interested in a lots of different people and markets. I've done covers on Google, HP, Wireless, Africa, Philanthropy, Yahoo, and the Canadian dope industry. I was at The Wall Street Journal, covering tech in the Silicon Valley, and earlier that wrote about Japanese banks, financial markets, and the energy business from Tokyo. I have been a traveling salesman, a street peddler, a ghost writer, and a bellboy at a hotel in Alaska. I've got degrees from Kenyon and the University of London, and held a Knight-Bagehot fellowship at Columbia. I lecture at U.C. Berkeley's iSchool, appear Saturdays on Fox News' "Forbes on Fox," and manage to keep my wife and two teenage sons reasonably entertained.