Bechtolsheim's Arista Networks Releases A Virtualized Network OS For The Cloud

Andy Bechtolsheim’s cloud computing startup Arista Networks, which sells 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches aimed at handling the loads at cloud-computing data centers, has launched a new product today called vEOS (virtualized Extensible Operating System) Software. The software sits on top of their switches and glues physical, virtual, and cloud servers, using VMWare.

Arista’s Network’s switches act as a link between those physical servers in corporate data centers, virtualized servers, and the cloud. With vEOS, IT organizations can now move workloads from physical servers to virtual machines and to cloud infrastructures while maintaining segmentation, trust boundaries, and policy control.

The advantage to having vEOS software is that the system will bridge the virtualization gap between physical and virtual networks. vEOS will be available in the fourth quarter of 2009. Arista is the brainchild of David Cheriton and Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and more recently a bunch of networking startups which were bought by Cisco, like Granite Systems (and is an early investor in VMWare).