HPE and Arista Networks extend their partnership

Today in Boston at our HPE Global Partner Conference, Antonio Neri, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Group for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, announced an exciting new strategic partnership with Arista Networks that will advance our strategy to provide secure Hybrid IT solutions built on the industry’s leading software-defined data center infrastructure portfolio.

This partnership expands on the existing HPE Converged Architecture agreement we announced last June that focused on building application workload reference architectures as part of our HPE Converged Architecture ecosystem. HPE is now advancing this partnership in offering our customers and partners the ability to purchase Arista Networks switching products directly from HPE starting November 7, 2016.

Cloud Optimized Data Center Networking

Arista was founded to pioneer and deliver software-driven cloud networking solutions for large data center storage and computing environments. Arista has accomplished this by offering customers a better, open, software-defined alternative for cloud-scale data centers. Arista had focused initially in the US on the financial industry (FSI/low latency) and the “cloud titans” such as Microsoft with solutions that target hyper-scale and Web 2.0 data centers. Arista has become the fastest growing vendor in high-speed data center networking (40/100GbE) segment and is growing at remarkable pace with Q2 revenue of $268M growing 37% year over year putting them on a one billion dollar annualize run rate.¹

The move to Software-defined Data Centers

Software-defined networking continues to gain market traction as an innovative architectural model capable of enabling automated provisioning, network virtualization, and network programmability for data centers at cloud-providers and enterprise networks. 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

HPE and Arista share a common vision around the need to deliver secure Hybrid IT solutions and experiences built on industry-leading software-defined infrastructure – helping customers to operate their workloads with speed and agility to grow their business. This partnership will provide our customers with best of breed networking solutions that are superior to legacy networking solutions and that are complementary to our HPE Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG) solutions including HPE compute, storage, virtualization and cloud offerings.

According to Crehan Research’s latest Data Center Switch Long-Range Forecast Report, a confluence of faster data center Ethernet switch upgrades will propel the market to $15 billion by 2020. The firm projects that 100 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switching will ramp strongly by the second half of this year and that 400GbE will experience robust growth in 2018.

HPE networking portfolio positioning