Arista Networks EOS (Highly Modular)

In my response to earlier post “Did cisco copy JUNOS“, a network engineer called “Router guy” suggested  considering Arista Networks. And the information I gathered from their website was good enough to prove that cisco is still lagging years behind the other vendors, at least, technology wise. Cisco started realizing the facts and spent billions of $$$ to get half way to where other vendors did at smaller costs. I can name 5 such at this moment.

Arista EOS is designed to provide a foundation for the business needs of next-generation datacenters and cloud networks. EOS is a highly modular software design based on a unique multi-process state sharing architecture that completely separates networking state from the processing itself. This enables fault recovery and incremental software updates on a fine-grain process basis without affecting the state of the system.

Arista EOS provides robust and reliable data center communication services while delivering security, stability, openness, modularity and extensibility. This unique combination offers the opportunity to significantly improve the functionality and evolution of next generation data centers.
Official VIDEO:

They summarize the key points:
Modularity

* Software fault containment to single modules for superior system stability
* Modules may be upgraded independent of the others

High Availability

* In-service software upgrades (ISSU) of individual modules
* Stateful fault repair of modules for automatic self healing

Third Party Extensibility

* Customizable to particular customer needs
* Native integration with virtualized environments

Manageability

* Familiar industry standard CLI eases management tasks
* Easily adaptable to in-house network management systems

I believe, IOS XE provides most of these but its still far from being adopted at all cisco routers/switches due to both marketing/technical/compatibility reasons. The one gap that cisco still hasn’t been able to achieve is “Third party Extensibility”. Though Cisco took a linux QNX kernel and modified to make IOS XE, they didn’t make it OPEN. Its now a propriety Linux kernel. Hence they ommit any chances of expandability, monotonizing the things as they always do.