Earlier this month the New York Stock Exchange celebrated the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Arista Networks (ANET)
 

Fortunately for Arista employees, over the past 2-weeks (since Arista's June 6th IPO) they have watched the stock price of Arista soar, especially when compared to the stock price of Cisco, for example:

Stock price chart comparison of Arista Networks (ANET) vs. Cisco Systems (CSCO)
 

Source: Yahoo! Finance
 

I mean, Arista engineers appear to have made a wise employment choice while Cisco engineers are hopefully getting gratification from their work that helps facilitate the stock cash outs of Cisco's top executives and board directors.

And it now appears a boiling point may have been reached between the two!

How so?

Well today, a former Distinguished Cisco Engineer (now an Arista engineer), Lincoln Dale, and Cisco's Nexus 9000 and application centric infrastructure (ACI) technical marketing engineer, Joe Onisick, have been slugging it out with Twitter Tweets that are exceptionally entertaining to read.

As an example, see the below screenshot of their Tweets:
 

So what started this entertaining Cisco ACI vs. Arista Networks Twitter Tweet slugfest?

Well, Cisco claims a lot of 'open things' around ACI, but the actual frame format on the Ethernet wire is a proprietary header they call eVXLAN.

According to Joe Onisick:

"The overall confusion arises not from our use of technology, but from our slides. Slides with 'eVxLAN' are being phased out; because these lead people to believe that we use a proprietary protocol. We do not, we use VxLAN. The reason we originally used that differentiation is to distinguish between VxLAN tunnels within the fabric, as compared to those connected to the fabric."
 

So for all the rhetoric on 'Open APIs' the actual packet format is designed to lock out all other vendors and ensure that it is only Cisco in the switching layers.
 

Cisco has to open the provisioning APIs so customer systems can use them, and they have to connect to Load Balancers since Cisco got out of the market after getting trounced by F5 and others and they don't have commanding share in Security so they have to partner there as well (plus the market dynamics of security almost always demand multi-vendor).

According to Joe Onisick:

"BiDi are based on Cisco innovation and patents. They are currently available exclusively from Cisco... The reason the proprietary FUD is so laughable is because BiDi is an OPTION, not a requirement."
 

Related documents:

Joe Onisick Twitter Feed

Lincoln Dale Twitter Feed

35 page slide presentation: Cisco ACI Briefing

Related stories:

Network World: A breakdown of Cisco ACI pricing

Cisco Nexus 9000 switch starts at $79K for 288 ports

$125K entry level street price for Cisco application centric infrastructure (ACI)