Arista Networks

Overview

Arista Networks, Inc.

type	Public company
traded as	nyse: ANET S&P 500 component
former name	Arastra (2004–2008)
industry	Networking hardware
founded	October 2004
founders	Andy Bechtolsheim Kenneth Duda David Cheriton
hq location city	Santa Clara, California
hq location country	U.S.
key people	Jayshree Ullal (CEO and Chairperson) Andy Bechtolsheim (Chief Architect) Kenneth Duda (President & CTO) Todd Nightingale (President & COO)
products	Network operating systems Network switches
revenue	US$9.006 billion (2025)
operating income	US$3.8 billion (2025)
net income	US$3.5 billion (2025)
assets	US$19.45 billion (2025)
equity	US$12.37 billion (2025)
num employees	4,465
num employees year	December 2024
owners	Andy Bechtolsheim (15.3%)
website	arista.com
footnotes	‡R1R‡‡R2R‡

Arista Networks, Inc. (formerly Arastra)[3] is an American computer networking company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking (SDN) for large datacenter, cloud computing, high-performance computing, and high-frequency trading environments. These products include 10/25/40/50/100/200/400/800 gigabit low-latency cut-through Ethernet switches. Arista's Linux-based network operating system, Extensible Operating System (EOS), runs on all Arista products.

Corporate history

In 2004, Andy Bechtolsheim, Kenneth Duda and David Cheriton founded Arastra (later renamed Arista[3]). Bechtolsheim and Cheriton were able to fund the company themselves.[4]

Products

Extensible Operating System

EOS is Arista's network operating system, and comes as one image that runs across all Arista devices[20] or in a virtual machine (VM).[21] EOS runs on an unmodified Linux kernel with a userland that is initially Fedora-based.[22] The userland has since been rebased on CentOS and later, AlmaLinux.[23] There are more than 100 independent regular processes, called agents, responsible for different aspects and features of the switch, including drivers that manage the switching application-specific integrated circuit (ASICs), the command-line interface (CLI), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Spanning Tree Protocol, and various routing protocols. All the state of the switch and its various protocols is centralized in another process, called Sysdb. Separating processing (carried by the agents) from the state (in Sysdb) gives EOS two important properties. The first is software fault containment, which means that if a software fault occurs, any damage is limited to one agent.[24] The second is stateful restarts, since the state is stored in Sysdb, when an agent restarts it picks up where it left off.[25] Since agents are independent processes, they can also be upgraded while the switch is running (a feature called ISSU – In-Service Software Upgrade).

The fact that EOS runs on Linux allows the usage of common Linux tools on the switch itself, such as tcpdump or configuration management systems. EOS provides extensive application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate with and control all aspects of the switch. To showcase EOS' extensibility, Arista developed a module named CloudVision[26] that extends the CLI to use Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) as a shared message bus to manage and configure switches.[27] This was implemented simply by integrating an existing open-source XMPP Python library with the CLI.

Programmability

In addition to all the standard programming and scripting abilities traditionally available in a Linux environment, EOS can be programmed using different mechanisms:

Advanced Event Management[28] can be used to react to various events and automatically trigger CLI commands, execute arbitrary scripts or send alerts when state changes occur in the switch, such as an interface going down or a virtual machine migrating to another host.
Event Monitor tracks changes made to the medium access control (MAC), Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), and routing table in a local SQLite database for later querying using standard Structured Query Language (SQL) queries.[29]
eAPI (External API)[30]

Programmability

In addition to all the standard programming and scripting abilities traditionally available in a Linux environment, EOS can be programmed using different mechanisms:

Advanced Event Management[28] can be used to react to various events and automatically trigger CLI commands, execute arbitrary scripts or send alerts when state changes occur in the switch, such as an interface going down or a virtual machine migrating to another host.
Event Monitor tracks changes made to the medium access control (MAC), Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), and routing table in a local SQLite database for later querying using standard Structured Query Language (SQL) queries.[29]
eAPI (External API)[30] offers a versioned JSON-RPC interface to execute CLI commands and retrieve their output in structured

Ethernet switches

Arista's product line can be separated into different product families:

The low latency of Arista switches has made them prevalent in high-frequency trading environments, such as the Chicago Board Options Exchange[51] (largest U.S. options exchange) and RBC Capital Markets.[52] As of October 2009, one third of its customers were big Wall Street firms.[53]

Arista's devices are multilayer switches, which support a range of layer 3 protocols,[54] including IGMP, Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), IS-IS, and OpenFlow. The switches are also capable of layer 3 or

Arista Networks

Corporate history

Products

Extensible Operating System

Programmability

Programmability

Ethernet switches

Arista Community Central

What the Community Offers

Major competitors

External links

References