UPDATED: IT hardware architect Andy Bechtolsheim will become chairman and chief development officer of startup Arista Networks, which has about 50 employees. Arista also names former Cisco Systems Vice President Jayshree Ullal, a 25-year industry veteran, as its president and CEO.Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the four founders of Sun Microsystems and the
chief architect of the company's hardware systems for the better part of a
generation, said Oct. 23 he is joining Arista Networks, a startup in
the cloud computing space.
Bechtolsheim will become chairman and chief development officer of the startup,
which has about 50 employees. Arista Networks is based in Menlo
Park, Calif. Also on Oct. 23,
Arista Networks named former Cisco Systems Vice President Jayshree Ullal, a
25-year industry veteran, as its president and chief executive.
Bechtolsheim, a Stanford University
engineering graduate, co-founded Sun in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod
Khosla and Bill Joy.
Bechtolsheim, however, is not leaving Sun completely. He will move to part-time
status as chief architect and senior vice president of Sun's Systems Group, Sun
spokesperson Alex Plant said.
Plant told eWEEK that Bechtolsheim will remain with Sun to continue to create
new product architectures, including X64 servers and storage servers, and will
continue to work on key strategic initiatives, such as high-performance
computing.
"I am very proud of all the accomplishments we have achieved as a systems
team, including the Sun Fire X4000 family of X64 servers, the Sun Constellation
System, the Sun Fire storage servers and Flash Storage, and Sun Datacenter
Switch 3x24, and I look forward to many more over the coming years,"
Bechtolsheim said in a company-released statement.
Arista makes 10GB Ethernet switches for data centers that the company claims
are priced at one-tenth the cost of those made by its leading competitor, the
world's largest networking infrastructure provider, Cisco Systems. Bechtolsheim
worked at Cisco Systems for seven years in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Arista's Extensible Operating System, a pioneering new software architecture with
self-healing and live in-service software upgrade capabilities, is the
company's core intellectual property.
Click here to read more about Sun's storage strategy.
Bechtolsheim was one of the first two financial backers of Google, investing
$100,000 in 1998. Bechtolsheim reportedly wrote the check to "Google
Inc." prior to the company even being founded.
In fact, the story goes, when Bechtolsheim gave the check to Lawrence Page and
Sergey Brin, Google's founders, they did not yet even have a checking account
into which the check could be deposited.
This is the second time Bechtolsheim has left Sun to go elsewhere. He returned
to Sun in 2006 to help develop the company's new storage server array, namely
the Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper," which is among Sun's best-selling storage machines.
The Thumper storage server, an NAS (network-attached storage) product package that includes
Galaxy servers powered by AMD Opterons and
StorageTek backup, is causing most of the buzz in the company's storage
business. One 19-inch-wide, 7.5-inch-deep Thumper server contains 48
hot-swappable disk drives totaling as much as 24TB of storage.
The system of switches, servers and storagedesigned
by Bechtolsheimis aimed at the three main providers of video-on-demand
content: telecommunications companies, large cable television providers and
smaller cable companies.