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Arista Networks and Supermicro are combining forces to develop tightly integrated data center solutions for hyperscale workloads.
The two companies announced March 30 that Supermicro will integrate Arista’s networking switch products and EOS+ network operating system into its server and storage hardware to create rack-level offerings that officials said will drive the adoption of software-defined data center (SDDC) environments. They will be optimized for workloads in such areas as high-performance computing, network virtualization, big data, server virtualization and storage software.
The move also brings Supermicro and Arista into the rapidly growing market of converged and integrated infrastructure solutions that include such top-tier vendors as Oracle, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, EMC, VCE and Cisco Systems.
Such offerings—which include highly integrated server, storage, networking, virtualization and management software in a single package—are designed to give organizations data center solutions that are easier and less costly to deploy and manage than traditional systems. The demand for such infrastructures is being fueled by such trends as mobile computing, big data, social networks and the cloud, which are forcing massive changes in the data center.
“Our collaboration provides customers greater flexibility and control over their IT infrastructure with Arista’s open standards-based SDN-class cloud network architecture,” Wally Liaw, senior vice president of sales at Supermicro, said in a statement. “Complete validated SDDC rack solutions can now be rapidly deployed with unparalleled scalability, availability, and open programmability.”
The preconfigured rack solutions will target workloads running on such technologies as the open-source OpenStack cloud orchestration software, virtualization products from VMware (NSX and ESXi) and Microsoft (Hyper-V), Hadoop and Ceph storage software. The offerings will be available from Supermicro and its channel partners.
“The partnership with Supermicro accelerates the adoption of next generation IT data center architectures, and enables our joint customers to take better advantage of hybrid cloud and cloud scale economics,” Ed Chapman, vice president of business development and alliances for Arista, said in a statement.
The market for integrated infrastructure and platforms is growing faster than the traditional data center infrastructure space, according to analysts with IDC. The firm on March 26 released the latest quarterly market numbers, saying revenue for integrated infrastructure and platforms jumped 19.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, hitting more than $2.7 billion. For all of 2014, revenues increased 28.9 percent, to more than $9.4 billion.
The market shipped 1.2 exabytes of new storage capacity throughout the quarter, up 42.2 percent, and increased 52.8 percent for the entire year, to 3.5 exabytes.
“An expanding number of organizations around the world are turning to integrated systems as a way to address longstanding and difficult infrastructure challenges,” Eric Sheppard, research director of storage for IDC, said. “This drove $2.1 billion of net-new spending in 2014 and makes these solutions an increasingly rare source of high growth within the broader infrastructure marketplace.”
The demand is driving competition in the space, according to Jed Scaramella, research director of enterprise servers for IDC.
“The integrated systems market continued to exhibit strong momentum throughout 2014 and represents a growth opportunity for IT vendors,” Scaramella said in a statement. “The industry saw competitive dynamics shift in 2014 with major vendors completing company privatization and acquisitions, as well as many forming new partnerships. These actions are sure to set a new competitive landscape for 2015.”