What a brilliant concept. Force10 had better watch out, it looks like this is serious competition for their exascale product.

Does anybody know how active a role Bechtolsheim played in the actual engineering on this? The article makes it sound like he personally worked on the design. If true, that's uncommon for someone in his position and I'm impressed.

He is definitely the "real deal."

I'd like to see some comparison with real Ethernet switching companies like Extreme, Brocade or Force-10.

Ethernet switching isn't really Cisco's cup of tea. They're OK at it but it's not really what they're best at. Same with Juniper.

Smart guys, going for the pickaxe business in the gold rush. The software side is also interesting (EOS, vEOS pages). From http://www.aristanetworks.com/en/products/7500series: Arista EOS ... Access hundreds of Linux networking applications

"Open network operating system - add your own applications and components"

Does that mean I could deploy an app directly on the switch? That would be seriously cool.

I hope they have learnt the lessons from Vyatta. A solid product which couldn't make it against the networking giants.

...It has 384 ports–think of them like pipes for data–that connect to racks...

Seriously? Pipes for data? Sadly, the article does not go on to say

...really deliver 10 gigabits a second... think of a gigabit as a lot of water...

Actually, pipes or tubes are not that bad of an analogy for network links.

In datacenter speak we say pipes = network. Customers who collocate ask for ping, power and pipes.

They got it right.

Obligatory xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/181/