Arista takes Ethernet into the rack, and the network becomes the backplane

Since its founding in 2004, it’s arguable that no network vendor has made better switches than Arista Networks Inc. That was true then and remains true, as its prowess in this area helped it ride the cloud boom and the artificial intelligence wave. That model is changing as AI scales. Today, ahead of next week’s Open Compute Project Global Summit in San Jose, Arista announced an expansion of its AI network strategy from switches to rack scale. Arista is launching an open Ethernet rack-scale portfolio covering both scale-up and scale-out AI fabrics, built with a large ecosystem of players such as Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Arm Ltd., Broadcom Inc., d-Matrix Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Qualcomm Corp. The lead announcement is Etherlink SU-144, an Ethernet-based scale-up architecture that connects up to 144 accelerators, or XPUs, within a single-hop domain and up to 1,024 XPUs across…