Server vendor, Sun Microsystems has taken a beating financially, and now it is losing its co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The executive left the struggling company last week to become chief development officer and chairman of the board at Arista, which sells 10-gigabit Ethernet switches. The company is poised to help companies take advantage of cloud computing, and is developing very fast cloud networking software.

Arista was founded by Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton, a engineering professor at Stanford University. The start-up has about 50 employees and its customers include Bit Gravity, Northwestern University and Lawrence Livermore Labs. Also part of the company is 15-year Cisco veteran Jayshree Ullal, who last May left her post as senior vice president of the networking giant's data center, switching and security technology group.

When asked if the company will compete with Cisco, Ullal said customers will use Cisco for their mainstream work and turn to Arista for running vertical applications such as video content, storage and retrieval.

"I'm glad not to be in a public market company," Ullal told Forbes.com. "It's good to get back to my small company roots and grow something."

For more on Bechtolscheim's latest move:
- check out this Forbes.com article

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