Data center interconnect focus of Infinera, Arista Networks partnership

Optical packet transport systems vendor Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) and switch vendor Arista Networks, Inc. (NYSE: ANET) have partnered to promote the use of their products for data center interconnect and related applications. The agreement, Infinera's first technical partnership, focuses on Arista's 7000 series switching portfolio and Infinera's Cloud Xpress metro cloud platform (see "Infinera ships Cloud Xpress platform").

According to Infinera Senior Director, Solutions Marketing Vinay Rathore and Arista Vice President, Business Development and Alliances Ed Chapman, the partnership initially will focus on a pair of applications: metro cloud for such companies as Internet content providers and large enterprises, and the low-latency connectivity requirements of companies such as financial institutions. Within this envelope, Infinera and Arista envision their combined offerings working well to support IP storage networking, big data environments, high-performance computing (HPC), and media and entertainment networking.

The systems vendors will be able to jointly present a turnkey switch/optical transport combination that has already proven to be interoperable and that meets requirements for flexible and scalable switching and connectivity, they assert.

To this end, the two companies will tout open programmability, use of open protocols, and virtualization support. While the hardware combination has not yet been tested in a full software-defined networking (SDN) environment, Chapman expressed confidence that customers will be able to employ the partnership's equipment in such a manner.

The alliance includes co-selling of each other's products, the sources said. The two companies have a small list of overlapping customers, but they envision opening new business through this new arrangement.

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