Sun co-founder Bechtolsheim Resigns from chief architect’s Post

Sun Microsystems - invincible developer and multinational vendor of servers and softwares announced on Thursday, the changeover of post its co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim from full time chief architect to part time advisor with immediate effect.

Bechtolsheim, 53, a profoundly honored techno wizard co-founded and invented Sun Microsystems first product, a high powered desktop computer- known as workstation, during his graduating year at Stanford University, California. Since that period Mr. Bechtolsheim has been instrumental in conceptualizing the company's servers, but now is taking a step back from his post of chief architect, to focus on his 4 year old networking project, now known as the company ‘Arista Networks’.

Arista Networks challenges the dominance of networking giant Cisco Systems Inc by its ultra-fast network switch that locomotes Internet traffic using the 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard which is many times faster than other technology that dominates data centers. The company has packaged its equipment in compact cases to furnish more connections at a price almost one-tenth of similar product from Cisco.

Arista’s network switch supports fast connections for servers with heavy Web traffic. The hardware has marked its sale in small quantities to universities, government labs, and various Internet traffic handling companies.

The reason behind instant fame of Arista’s switches is its design, based on modularity that splits all tasks into modules that makes the software easy to update and it also uses more powerful chips to run.

Bechtolsheim will serve as chairman and chief development officer at Arista. Along with him in Arista, would be David R.Cheriton (Stanford University professor) - as chief scientist and Jayshree Ullal (Cisco's ex- switch business head, who quit Cisco in May) - as chief executive officer. Mr. Bechtolsheim and Mr. Cheriton have done a couple of projects together and were also investors in Google and VMware whose success made them billionaires. Both are also the sole investors in Arista.

Sun Microsystems has been battling hard against decline in its sales, profits and share prices and now the announcement of Mr. Bechtolsheim’s resignation from chief architect’s post will give another blow to Sun. To neutralize this anticipated danger the company has made a positive announcement that Mr. Bechtolsheim will continue to play an advisory role in products development.

“It’s my baby,” Mr. Bechtolsheim said. “I will always be associated with Sun.”