Arista claims industry’s fastest data center switch

Arista Networks recently announced significant enhancements to its flagship Arista 7500 modular switching platform that enables cloud networks to scale to over 100,000 servers and millions of virtual machines, while delivering the first network architecture that can concurrently support cloud, Big Data, storage, Web 2.0 and virtualization technologies.

Offering among the industry’s highest 10/40/100 GbE port densities, and featuring the fully programmable Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) software, with the 7500E platform customers can now achieve the level of automation necessary to build effective Software Defined Networks (SDN), claims the company.


“The 7500E Series is a major engineering achievement, offering the industry’s highest throughput and 3x the capability of the original Arista 7500 in every dimension -- performance, density and power without a chassis upgrade,” comments Andreas Bechtolsheim, Arista’s chairman and chief development officer. “It enables customers to build the world’s largest switching infrastructures that handle the most demanding workloads with ease.”

Related: Everything you need to know about 'Big Data'

The Arista 7500E offers 1,152 10 GbE, 288 40 GbE, or 96 100 GbE wire-speed ports, putting the platform on the short list of fastest and most scalable data center Ethernet switches on the market. Key improvements to the Arista 7500E compared to the first generation Arista 7500 switches, according to the company, are as follows:

-- Three times the fabric bandwidth at 30 Terabits per second.
-- Three times the packet buffer at 144 Gigabyte per switch.
-- Three times the control plane performance.
-- Triple the power efficiency at less than 4 watts per 10GbE port.
-- The industry’s first triple-speed 10/40/100GbE line card.
-- Much larger L2 and L3 Table sizes.
-- Wirespeed VXLAN capability on every port.

The Arista 7500E includes four new line cards for 10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet switching, including an industry-first triple-speed 10/40/100G line card with integrated MXP (multi-speed-port) optics that can be software configured on a per port basis delivering constant price-per-bandwidth at every port speed. In 100GbE mode the triple-speed line card offers an order-of-magnitude cost reduction over competing 100Gb Ethernet switch products in the market, claims Arista.

“The high density 40GbE and 100 GbE interfaces, deep packet buffers, SDN features and the robustness of EOS makes the Arista 7500 an ideal spine platform for our network,” asserts Benjamin Nathan, director, IT Operations and Infrastructure, at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. “Arista continues to innovate on programmability with its Linux based EOS and was a key factor in deciding on the 7500E for our Big Data needs."

Importantly, the Arista 7500E, together with Arista EOS, delivers a set of advanced SDN capabilities that support programmatic control, enhanced monitoring, and self-healing resilience to every aspect of the switch, including the following:

-- Wirespeed VXLAN gateways that enable multi-tenant network virtualization.
-- Precise advanced traffic monitoring with Arista LANZ, DANZ and Tap Aggregation.
-- Rapid Automated Indication of Link-Loss (RAIL) for accelerated convergence in Big Data analytics and Hadoop applications.
-- VM Tracer for network wide workload mobility and virtualization in VMware and OpenStack clouds.
-- Distributed system health monitoring with real-time Health Tracer.

Cloud networks have universally adopted a leaf-spine architecture, using Layer-3 load-balancing to provide scalable performance. With the Arista 7500E as the spine and Arista 7150/7050 as the leaf, these network topologies can support cloud data centers with more than 100,000 servers that deliver consistent performance for dynamically scaling workloads in public or private clouds, including Hadoop, Big Data, storage, Web 2.0, VM farms, and network virtualization.

The 7500E series switches and line-card modules are generally available now. Entry level US list prices start at $99,995 for the switch and $10,000 per 100GbE port, $2,200 per 40GbE and under $600 per 10GbE port.