Category: Arista Networks

When I left Cisco I thought I knew everything. I felt I could go to any company, that I should probably be running wherever I went, and that I was quite unstoppable. I learned a lot in the last few years

If you’re reading this you know I went to Arista Networks – and to put it simply, we do things a LOT differently than traditional networking companies, and a lot differently from most VC-funded companies too. Now my boss, our CEO Jayshree Ullal, would kill me if I put up a post with the ‘secret awesome sauce’ that comprises how our engineering team builds software (what I can say is its the most fully automated development environment I have ever seen – a large percentage of the code is auto generated – especially the annoying bits that enables interprocess communications, test is automated so there is no BS regression testing, etc).

What I think is pretty equally awesome though is how we rapidly embraced the cloud and SaaS/IaaS capabilities. Here’s a few examples…

• I just wrote a press release for a product launch that is coming up. I used a tool called Scrivener I have worked with a bit that enables me to keep document ‘chunks’ handy and re-use them consistently. Nice for product descriptions, form data on them, and closing boilerplate. This I exported as a text block that I then went to Box.net whom we use for document collaboration.
• In Box.net in the Marketing folder I went to this specific product launch fold and created a Google Word Doc and put my first draft press release into it. Now the entire marketing team gets an email update that I did this and a collection of smart and savvy folks can pile on and help the document get better.
• We made our data sheets in Apple Pages rather than InDesign. Why? Simply because we don’t outsource our doc design and editing to third-party firms or agencies and keep it all in house so we wanted a simple and easy to use tool with decent layout capabilities. You can export from Pages to PDF easily and the Data sheets look good. More importantly when you find a mistake you don’t have to go back to a 3rd party agency to get the doc edited – its done in minutes in house.
• Similarly with our website – I remember taking weeks to get changes through in my previous job. Now we run Joomla! we have a few people who know it quite well and a few more who know how to quickly edit docs, change banners, etc. Web publishing is nicely simplified.
• Our Joomla! instance is hosted in the cloud on a hosting provider – no one has to worry about the hardware, or a disk failure, and so on – keeps the IT burden low.

I can keep going on how we have a BYOD culture from the start, with most people opting for Macs but a few outliers with Linux and such loaded on their PCs, how we use tools like SalesForce and NetSuite to avoid huge onsite server farms with lots of complex software, and how we use hosted PBX services like Fonality – which uses my friend Mark Spencer’s creation Asterisk in a hosted model to lower PBX costs.

We’ve identified what is core to our business – SW development, and kept that in-house in a very secure environment.  We’ve identified what is context – email (Gmail), CRM (SalesForce), ERP/Accctng (NetSuite), Content Management (Box.net), etc – and then worked with them to ensure they met our requirements as we grew and scaled.  I often state that I don’t know why a company our size would ever buy a server for IT – but then I found out we do have three VMs we run in-house for IT: One for NTP, one for DNS, and one for DHCP.  Not bad for 3/20ths of a machine…

The success of many of these companies clearly indicates that we are not alone in this use case – it does seem to be the smart way to build out if your compliance and regulatory environment supports it and you can accomplish your mission effectively.

dg

Am settling back into a more normal pace and frame of mind after Interop and the launch of the Arista 7500.  Pretty busy several weeks I have to say – I have never worked so hard on a tradeshow booth in my life- I was sort of used to it just ‘appearing’ and then ‘appearing again’ somewhere else.  I realize now, more than ever what all goes into making these types of events successful and how it takes a small army of often under-appreciated people to make these things tick.

This would be my 14th or 15th year going to Interop, and somewhere around my 20th show (counting Atlanta and New York venues).  I remember working in the NOC, setting up the first multi-vendor MPLS network, and over the years it feeling like a class reunion as much as a tradeshow.

My week sort of went like this…

I showed up in Vegas at the booth over the weekend- we got a really interesting and neat location- right by the door, right next to Cisco, VMWare and Riverbed – all great neighbors!  At one point Donna Shim from Cisco came over to me when I was screwing something together, setting up a demo, placing signage, or something and said, “You are doing booth setup?”  She then started laughing hysterically.  I think that summed it up.  Ted was kind enough to score me a screwdriver and knife that we needed to open up some boxes, or I would still be staring at them wondering how to get my demo working…

Brooke, Sean, Tom, Mark, and I plied our trade for most of Sunday watching things start coming together.  Vanessa from Blazer, our exhibit partner, was a gem on getting a lot of the heavy lifting done, but we were a bit stressed on two main areas: getting our Internet access working was problematic and impeded our demonstrations which were remotely executing; and figuring out how to cool the Ixia test gear in the Arista 7500 demo pod!

The guys from the Switch Super|NAP were amazing and set up a phenomenal looking 10-Rack T-SCIF in our booth area (Thermal Separation Compartment In-Facility) which we then kitted out with about 240 ports of 10GbE, some copper some fiber, in order to showcase some amazing stuff from our partners – Joyent, Greenplum, Adva, Terranetics, Fulcrum, etc…

Getting the largest and highest performance single-device 10Gb Ethernet test working in two racks without special cooling was up to Sean and the great guys from Ixia – JJ and Ali.  After we figured out that the test equipment sort of blew hot air out the front, which our switch then ingested and spit out the back we got to do some crazy engineering – involving what looked suspiciously like a dorm room fan or two, to get the test gear to sort of behave like data center gear.  (For future reference – test and measurement equipment is almost always not designed for front-to-rear cooling)

By Tuesday morning things were coming together- at one point I was climbing the truss to liberate a wireless AP we needed to reconfigure a bit, and Jeff and Chuck thankfully got that working with about 4 minutes to spare to we could get the vEOS, VM Tracer, and EOS demos up and running remotely.  Whew!

The b’ARISTA got cranking making some good coffee – lattes so good even Stephen Foskett blogged about them!  (and thankfully didn’t list us as one of those vendors with no tie ins whatsoever between their tradeshow promotions and their corporate brand)

By 10:15 Tuesday the booth was packed, and it pretty much did not let up until the lights dimmed in the evening each day.  I remembered my Chloroseptic and cough drops – mandatory….

I had a really fun panel discussion with some folks from other networking companies.  These are always kind of fun but marginally awkward as a presenter as well often posing a quandary-  the audiences usually want to learn something, do not want an advertorial, and do want to be entertained.  Us vendors on the other hand almost always do not want to ‘get into it’ with each other because guys like Mike Fratto and Jim Duffy are always sitting in the audience pen in hand just waiting for it.  A bit nerve-wracking to say the least, but quite fun.

I think everyone on the panel requited themselves well, and while representing our respective franchises points-of-view we also did remind the audience that the great thing about the networking industry, and Interop in particular, is that while we sometimes trade barbs, we all agree our products MUST trade packets and frames.  Multi-vendor interoperability is the name of the game- if there is not that, then we as an industry suffer.

Special shout-out to Jim Metzler for hosting an awesome panel, and several hundred engaged end-users for joining and laughing at my occasional joke.  Martin – glad you appreciated my thoughts on large layer-2 versus tunneled layer-3 designs, and Rick Kagan – thanks for the text messages that vibrated my leg while I was trying to figure out how to respond to Thomas Scheibe on something about FCoE

Wednesday morning was pretty cool.  The Best of Interop awards in the main keynote area was such a great ove by show management – 2, 4, and 5 years ago when I was up for other awards it was in some random part of the tradeshow floor – having it in the Mandalay Ballroom gave them a real Academy Awards feel…  I am sure I speak for everyone nominated and attending when I say that it really made us feel special and made the awards that much ore meaningful to us.  Thank you.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of some great organizations and have a couple Best of Interop plaques around – always from the Infrastructure category   But I never thought that we’d win the big one – the overall Best in Show now that was cool!  I was sitting back off to the right with my iPhone 3GS recording Jayshree hopping up on stage and trying to drag her entourage up with her   (Thanks boss!)

Racing from there back to our booth area I think half the show came to enjoy a great mocha (thanks Robert!) and see what all the fuss was about with the Arista 7500.  The rest of my day was a blur of meetings, impromptu interviews, and crazy schedules.  We headed out with 40-50 customers at 4pm for a tour of the Switch Super|NAP – an insanely well designed and built data center that is about 5 minutes from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center and worth a visit if you are anywhere west of the Rockies.

Thursday was a bit calmer, and around 3pm we started packing things up.  I saw an amazing demo by Aprius of their virtualized I/O system.  It’s not shipping yet – but it really looks promising in carrying PCIe over Ethernet, and consolidating FC, Ethernet, disk controllers, SSD, etc all over Ethernet from the host.  Seriously cool.  I did not get to tour the show floor at all and see what other companies were announcing, demonstrating, or showing off – I’ll have to read the blogs and catch up on what I missed – am sure there was some awesome technology and products there this week.

Spent many hours responding to blogs, tweets, and lots of emails.  Then the race to pack as much as possible before everyone had to start rushing to the airport to catch flights home was on, and a smile of relief started hitting a lot of the faces I saw around.  A well earned weariness too – a long, but rewarding week, and a very good Interop.  Thanks Lenny!

dg