Arista Networks on Thursday announced the startup has landed two big executive fish: Jayshree Ullal and Andreas Bechtolsheim. Arista, formerly known as Arastra, a vendor of high-performance 10Gbit Ethernet and cloud networking solutions, is looking to give Cisco Systems a run for its money.
Ullal was previously senior vice president of Cisco, responsible for the $10 billion data center, switching and services group. Ullal will serve as president and CEO of Arista. A 25-year industry veteran, Ullal was named one of the “50 Most Powerful People” in 2005 by Network World and was nominated one of the 20 most powerful “Women to Watch in 2001” by Newsweek.
Bechtolsheim, a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur who cofounded Sun Microsystems and served as the company’s senior vice president and chief architect for the systems group, has been installed as chairman and chief development officer at Arista. From 1996 to 2003, Bechtolsheim was vice president and general manager of the gigabit systems business unit at Cisco.
A New Name for a New Era
Arista has been shipping a portfolio of 10Gbit Ethernet products since May to financial, high-performance computing, public sector, manufacturing, Internet data center, health care, and media/entertainment markets.
“I am delighted to join Arista. The combination of an outstanding team, innovative hardware, and software technology and the cloud networking vision drew me to this company,” Ullal said. “I look forward to creating a unique focus for our strategic customers, partners and channels.”
In the upcoming era of cloud computing, the Web will be much more than just a means of delivering content — it will be a platform in its own right, requiring an extremely scalable cloud networking infrastructure, according to Ullal.
“A similar transformation is happening in the enterprise, where many customers are consolidating existing data centers into much larger virtualized computing clouds,” Ullal said. “We look…