Distributed Scale Networking: Choice without Compromise

First, I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe. It is now more important than ever to stay connected, keep conversing with one another, and keep innovating. I feel so happy sharing this blog with the networking community, and the network warriors who are helping the world function during this unprecedented time. Having spent more than two decades in the domain of network infrastructure, it has been an amazing journey to be part of the mission to build the internet, build network infrastructure, and then scale it all exponentially over the years. Across the network technology spectrum covering optics, silicon, hardware systems, network operating system (Network OS), the control plane, as well as manageability and automation, there has been tremendous progress. I am excited to continue my journey within networking as a member on the technical advisory board (TAB) at Arrcus, Inc. So why Arrcus?

I am quite impressed by the quality, culture, as well as the overall expertise of the team and how well positioned the company is for addressing the challenges of today’s networking requirements and that of tomorrows. They have a track record of delivering industry shaping innovation, reliable, high volume production-deployed networking solutions for massively scalable infrastructure environments for both routing and switching. With advent of merchant silicon, hardware choice and competition has arrived in networking, but the lack of a high-performance, optimally featured independent networking software solution was the critical missing link in the market. With ArcOS, Arrcus finally delivers on this acute market need, enabling a vibrant choice and freedom for users at the right price-performance-scale metrics, while also driving down the cost-economics of building and operating network infrastructure.

ArcOS was architected from first principles for supporting the ever-increasing industry-wide silicon diversity, elastic scalability with ultra-high performance BGP, and best-in-class protocols with only the contemporary technology needed for an application relevant and distributed network. By extending use cases from the Data Center to the WAN and also to the edge and access, ArcOS is a production proven, resilient, scalable high-performance operating system that allows for easy standards-based automation and maximum network uptime. With focus on simplified scalable networking, ArcOS does not carry the legacy feature-bloat and hence avoids the associated bugs and ongoing OPEX costs of traditional solutions. One of the many innovations is that Arcos is built with a design goal to support industry-level silicon diversity and this enables end customers to choose optimal price-performance silicon based on the place of deployment in the network. As a result, both CAPEX reductions can be realized as well as supply base diversification as this allows operators the flexibility of deploying their own preferred hardware of choice. All of this is supported commercially with both a traditional HW+SW and also a pure-play SW pricing model. As a result, customers retain the value in their network software investment across hardware suppliers, and future generations of silicon technology.

The mission to build a simple, scalable, seamless and affordable internet is well underway but not complete as the network is continually evolving. Besides scale, experience from and with the network matters more and more which Arrcus has in spades. Much more needs to be done worldwide. A competitive marketplace in silicon, optics, and software enables the industry to move forward faster and support rapid innovation with best of breed components. Arrcus is doing their part as the amount of sheer innovation of ArcOS along with their deep visibility analytics platform ArcIQ is significan. This coupled with recent announcements for their virtualized distributed routing (VDR) and multi-cloud networking (MCN) solutions, Arrcus represents a strong offering that can unify networking needs from the data center, to the edge and into cloud environments. I am excited to support Arrcus in its quest to lead the way into the digital-first infrastructure era.