San Jose based startup Arrcus has emerged from stealth with its first product. The company, which also announced $15 million in Series A funding, touts its ArcOS network operating system as hardware-agnostic, making it perfect for pairing with white box platforms from various original design manufacturers (ODMs).
Arrcus founders include CEO Devesh Garg, CTO Keyur Patel, and Chief Architect Derek Yeung; collectively, they have experience at Broadcom, Cisco, and EZChip, where Garg was president at the time of its acquisition by Mellanox, as well as tenures at other companies. General Catalyst led the recent funding round, with participation from seed investor Clear Ventures. Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst, and Chris Rust, founder and general partner of Clear Ventures, joined the Arrcus board as a result of the transaction.
The company says it has created the missing piece of a white-box driven ecosystem: an independent, hardware-agnostic network operating system. ArcOS offers a resilient control plane, an intelligent Dataplane Adaptation Layer (DPAL), data-model driven telemetry, and YANG/OpenConfig APIs, according to the company. The software platform has been ported to Broadcom’s StrataDNX Jericho+ and StrataXGS Trident 3, increasing its potential applicability. The ArcOS-StrataDNX Jericho+ combination supports the full BGP internet routing table, the company points out.
Arrcus expects ArcOS to support the use of ODM-supplied hardware in a variety of network applications, including:
- Spine-leaf Clos in data centers
- Internet peering for CDN providers and ISPs
- Resilient routing to the host
- Scalable route-reflector clusters in physical/container form-factors.
The company says that platform is undergoing trials with “the world’s largest organizations,” and lined up positive quotes from ODMs such as Celestica, Delta Electronics (Americas) Ltd., Quanta Computer Inc., and Edgecore Networks as part of the press release that announced the product. The Open Network Users Group (ONUG) also appears to be impressed.
“I am excited about Arrcus and the impact it will have on our industry,” said Nick Lippis, ONUG co-chairman, via the press release. “ArcOS is a fundamental building block to assure a new generation of cloud infrastructure devices, including switches and routers, as they gain mainstream adoption. In particular, ArcOS delivers open orchestration, standards-based APIs, per module restartability plus security, best-in-class protocols with minimal open source dependency. All of this is important as IT becomes a key innovation enabler through smarter infrastructure. ArcOS can be deployed physically, virtually, and in the cloud, which is key for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.”
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