Arista 7000 X Series Takes On Cisco Catalyst

Adding to its software-defined cloud network, Arista Networks launched the 7000 X Series with the Arista 7300 and Arista 7250, which delivers a resilient architecture, enhanced programmability, control of virtualized networks, improved power efficiency, and price/performance optimized for universal cloud and data center deployments.

"Newer small form-factor core devices can enable network managers to reduce capital costs by 30 percent to 70 percent, and save 30 percent or more on operations expenses, compared with chassis-based switches," said Mark Fabbi, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Enterprises should not only compare the capital cost differences between fixed form factor switches and chassis-based switches, but also should look at operating expenditures (Opex) such as power consumption and maintenance, which can cut costs by at least 30 percent."

The Arista 7304, 7308 and 7316 with 4-, 8- and 16-line card slots, respectively, all share a common resilient architecture that scales up to 512 ports of 40GbE or 2,048 ports of 10GbE, with wirespeed performance of 40Tbps (terabits per second) of throughput. With power consumption under 3W per 10GbE port and latency under 2 microseconds, a pair of 7300 series switches replaces two Catalyst 6509Es with more than ten times the scale, throughput, latency improvement and power efficiency. Complementing the 7300X series, the Arista 7250X Series is a high density solution delivering 64 ports of wire-speed 40GbE or up to 256 Ports of 10GbE.

Both 7300X and 7250X series feature a unified forwarding table, new duplex fiber 40GbE Optics, real-time visibility into network congestion, and a physical-virtual-cloud network via Arista's VMtracer provisioning and native VXLAN support. The 7250QX-64 is available immediately, and the 7300X series will be available in the first quarter of 2014.