Monday, July 16, 2018

Arrcus builds Network OS for white box data center infrastructure

Arrcus, a start-up based in San Jose, California, emerged from stealth to unveil its software-driven, hardware agnostic network operating system for white boxes.

Arrcus said it sees an opportunity to help enterprises transform the way they manage their networks, liberating them from vertically integrated proprietary solutions and opening the door to horizontally diversified choices of best-in-class silicon and hardware systems.

The company's new ArcOS networking operating system has been ported to both Broadcom’s StrataDNX Jericho+ and StrataXGS Trident 3 switching silicon platforms.

ArcOS is built on a modular micro-services paradigm and offers advanced Layer 3 routing capabilities. Key elements include a hyper-performance resilient control plane, an intelligent, programmable Dataplane Adaptation Layer (DPAL), a data-Model Driven Telemetry for Control Plane, Data Planes and Environmental, and a consistent YANG/OpenConfig APIs for easy programmatic access.  These capabilities in conjunction with Broadcom’s StrataDNX Jericho+ platform enable the support for the full BGP internet routing table.

Arrcus cites the following use cases:

  • Spine-Leaf Clos for Datacenter workloads
  • Internet Peering for CDN providers and ISPs
  • Resilient Routing to the Host
  • Massively Scalable Route-Reflector clusters in physical/container form-factors

Arrcus also announced $15 million in Series A funding from General Catalyst and Clear Ventures. Advisors include include Pankaj Patel, former EVP and CDO of Cisco; Amarjit Gill, serial entrepreneur who founded and sold companies to Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, EMC, Facebook, Google, and Intel; Farzad Nazem, former CTO of Yahoo; Randy Bush, Internet Hall of Fame, founder Verio (basis of NTT’s DataCenter Business); Fred Baker, former Cisco Fellow, IETF Chair and Co-Chair of the IPv6 Working Group; Nancy Lee, ex-VP of People at Google, and Shawn Zandi, Director, Network Engineering at LinkedIn.

“We use ‘network different’ as our fundamental approach to enable the freedom of choice through our product innovation and challenging the status quo.  Arrcus has assembled the world’s best networking technologists, is bringing new capabilities, and changing the business model to make it easier to design, deploy, and manage large scale networking solutions for our customers,” stated Arrcus co-founder and CEO Devesh Garg.

  • Arrcus is headed by Devesh Garg, who previously was president of EZchip (acquired by Tilera) and founding CEO of Tilera (acquired by EZchip). He also served at Bessemer Venture Partners and Broadcom. Other Arrcus co-founders include Keyur Patel, who was a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco; and Derek Yeung, a former Principal Engineer at Cisco.