Andy Bechtolsheim's new firm, Arista Networks, is well positioned to capitalize on the burgeoning demand for 10GbE ethernet products that HPC users find essential to their operations. He told The Register's Timothy Prickett Morgan that "it is possible for some 25 percent of all servers in the installed base to have 10GbE ports by the year 2011." Said Bechtolsheim, "It is easier to forecast 10GE ports than revenues. This is one of the few areas in IT with predictable growth."

He sees it as possible to deliver a 10GbE switch for something like $500 per port. When 10GbE NICs become integrated on servers for a per-port cost of $250, including server and switch, there will be little question in the executive suites about whether it is the technology to buy, Bechtolsheim predicts.

"At that point, the gap is so small that companies will switch to 10 Gigabit Ethernet even if the extra performance and low latency is not needed," says Bechtolsheim.

Arista is already producing a 1U, rack-mounted 10GbE switch it calls the 7100 Series that offers 24 or 48 ports in a variety of configurations, from 600 nanoseconds to 2.9 microseconds of latency and from 480 to 800 Gb/sec of throughput at layers 2 and 3 of the network.

The 7100 Series features an operating system called the Extensible Operating System (EOS) and a virtualized implementation called vEOS that runs as a virtual appliance. Like Cisco's Nexus 1000v virtual switch, the 7100 Series integrates with VMware's vSphere hypervisor and virtual switch architecture. In this case, vEOS can run on the 7100 Series' x64 server and its hardened Linux operating system, not on an external blade, Morgan reports.

A further compelling feature of the 7100 Series is that EOS and vEOS implement a stateless architecture that allows the switch to restart itself when it crashes exactly at the point where it crashes, Bechtolsheim said. He noted that the switch also has the added bonus of allowing EOS to be patched while the switch is running and without resorting to needing redundant controllers that are patched in succession, as Cisco's high-end switches require.

With the addition of an x64 processor to the switch, Arista expects to be able to quickly add new software functions to the switch without requiring changes to the hardware, something that HPC customers are looking for, says Bechtolsheim. He looks to third parties who will create add-on software for its switches.

In the future, Bechtolsheim says that Arista will roll out a full line of modular switches and will put machines in the field that scale to higher port counts and lower latencies than any other modular switch on the market. "We will be competitive on all fronts," he insists.

According to Morgan, unlike Cisco, Arista has no plans for entering the server market. "Arista is not a server company," Bechtolsheim told him. "We want to partner with server companies."

"People are shifting IT spending to where it is most urgent," explains Bechtolsheim, adding that this is one reason why server spending is down this year. "The other effect is that servers are getting cheaper. We may be seeing the end of the utility function. In the past, when servers got more powerful, companies used to still buy more. Now, as servers get more powerful and less expensive, companies want to spend less. This is a very dramatic downshifting of server size and server price."

Bechtolsheim points out that the Nexus unified communications switches - which put Fibre Channel storage protocols on a 10GbE backbone so servers link to storage on the same box as they link to each other and the outside world - are significantly more expensive than buying 10GbE switches and FC switches and running them side by side.

In any case, Arista's switches will be able to support FCoE and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) protocols as soon as the standards settle down a bit and customers start asking for them, Morgan notes.

Bechtolsheim points out that, in the HPC market, the interconnection fabric for the server nodes was typically sold as part of a cluster, adding that InfiniBand has never been a separate distinct sale. The Ethernet connectivity market has always been completely distinct, and corporate data centers are still thinking about servers and networks as separate domains, Morgan writes, even when they use blade servers with switches integrated into the chassis.

Finally, Morgan suggests, Cisco may be correct about the convergence of servers, storage, and networks, that companies will want to have one vendor selling them an integrated system. If he is right about this, Morgan predicts that Arista will either have to sell servers, closely ally itself with server makers, or get eaten by a server maker. [...read more...]

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