Attacking Interconnects And Networks Across All Scales
The Next Platform, Thursday, November 6th, 2025
There are two competing forces in IT, and they are at play during the GenAI era as much as they have ever been during prior eras in the datacenter. One is the desire to provide a completely integrated system, ready for applications, from a single supplier. The other is to use a mix of best of breed components to make a custom system that better fits each unique customer.
Arista Networks has been genius at creating switches and sometimes routers that are best of breed and that are famously used by Microsoft and Meta Platforms in their vast networks to link their homegrown systems at hyperscale. Arista has over 10,000 customers and has sold more than 100 million ports for somewhere around $32.3 billion in revenues as of the end of 2024, which was two decades after it was founded. And in many cases, it has emerged as a 'blue box' supplier to the hyperscalers and cloud builders who want its iron and some of its firmware and management tools but not its EOS Linux-based network operating system because they have their own.