I have been teaching with Red Education since 2006. During that time, I have trained hundreds of students on various vendors’ solutions, products, and technologies.
When I heard two years ago that we were going to teach Arista, I got really excited because I had heard Arista was doing some “hot stuff” in the data centre and cloud space. As I found out shortly after, Arista Networks was founded to deliver software driven cloud networking solutions for large data centre and high- performance computing environments.
With more than two million cloud networking ports being deployed worldwide, Arista delivers a range of 1, 10, 40 and 100GbE products that redefine network architectures, bring extensibility to networking, and dramatically change the price/performance of data centre networks.
Arista was recognised by Gartner as a “visionary” in its 2014 “Magic Quadrant for Data Centre Networking” based on its ability to execute and completeness of vision. Arista designs their revolutionary products in California, and is comprised of experienced management and engineering team, many of whom have come from leading networking companies.
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, while teaching at Stanford.
- Product development head Andreas Bechtolsheim developed some of Cisco’s fastest switches. He also co-founded Sun Microsystems, and was Google’s first big backer.
- The other five top executives all spent time at Cisco, too.
Because so many of Arista’s leaders and engineers are former Cisco employees, Arista would seem to be treated as enemy No. 1 within Cisco — more so than Cisco’s traditional competitors, Juniper and HP.
Arista’s goal looks to be to 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.
Founded a decade ago, Arista is profitable. It reported an excellent last quarter – quarterly revenue of $US155.5 million was up over 50% from the year-ago quarter.
The course that I currently teach: Arista Configuration Essentials (ACE) 2.0 is a three-day, instructor-led, hands-on course. It covers an overview of Arista hardware and software (Extensible Operating System EOS), and the theory, operation and configuration of Arista differentiated features such as VM Tracer, Latency Analyser (LANZ), Multi-Chassis Lag (MLAG) and Advanced Event Management (AEM).
This course is designed to provide the student with a significant amount of meaningful hands-on lab time to support topics covered in class.
I hope I will see you soon!
Konrad Kuligowski, Senior Trainer @ Red Education
