Hewlett Packard Enterprise Expands Partnership with Arista Networks
In July of 2015 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Arista Networks formed a partnership to jointly build a converged infrastructures reference architecture to bring together products from both companies. At the time, the goal was to challenge competitors in the segment by addressing cloud environments. More than a year later, HPE just announced it is increasing the collaboration with Arista Networks by naming the company a preferred networking partner in a software defined infrastructure environment, and to give its customers and partners the option of purchasing Arista switches through HPE.
By increasing the collaboration between both organizations, HPE will have increased networking solutions as part of its portfolio. Currently HPE already has Arista Networks' FlexFabric and Altoline open white-box products, but the addition of its switches will increase its presence in the software-defined data center (SDDC) segment.
The partnership is also a move by HPE to give it a much stronger position to better compete with the global networking vendors, including Cisco Systems, Dell and Juniper Networks.
"This partnership will provide our customers with best-of-breed networking solutions that are superior to legacy networking solutions and that are complementary" to other data center technologies HPE sells, including compute, storage, virtualization and cloud offerings," said Dominic Wilde, vice president and general manager of the Data Center Networking business unit within HPE's Data Center Infrastructure Group.
When Hewlett-Packard split in two different companies in 2015, it allowed each entity to better focus in their respective fields. While HP Inc. addressed PCs and printers, HPE concentrated on selling IT solutions to enterprises. The company is still in a transition period as it continues to acquire and spin off different services.
With Arista, HPE will have increased capability in the network virtualization space. This is a growing industry that includes software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV) currently being adopted by telecoms, enterprises, data centers, network operators, and other large scale organizations.
Wilde goes on to say, "Although SDN initially found favor in hyper-scale data centers and at large-scale cloud service providers, it is also winning adoption in a growing number of enterprise data centers across a broad range of vertical markets."
Arista Networks has shipped more than five million cloud networking ports around the world with CloudVision and Extensible Operating System (EOS), a network operating system with single-image consistency across hardware platforms, and modern core architecture that makes it possible to deliver in-service upgrades and application extensibility. The company also has platforms that provide Ethernet speeds from 10 to 100 gigabits per second, making it the fastest growing vendor in in high-speed data center networking (40/100GbE) segment, according to Dell'Oro Group.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
