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Arista's Virtual Switch Takes Aim At Cisco's Nexus 1000V: Page 2 of 2

Doug Gourlay, a long time Cisco VP who recently joined Arista, sees the data center networking market, including virtual switching, as wide open. His position is that companies have different buying habits in data center networking and are more open to look at alternative vendors versus campus networking where the incumbent generally has a fairly strong foothold.

Depending on who you listen to, Cisco is fairly dominant in the data center; Gourlay mentioned a 50% share. InformationWeek's last survey on Ethernet switching deployments has Cisco's market share a bit higher at 62%, but more importantly, the nearest competitor, Dell and HP had a mere 7% each with other vendors having less. Our data indicates that companies tend to stick with the incumbent and often that is Cisco.

Regardless, this is a good move for Arista and provides for companies that need more command and control of their virtual machines for disaster recovery, fault tolerance, VM mobility and orchestration. vEOS is worth a look regardless of what physical switches you own.