Roundup: Arista's New 7124SX Switch, XO, Gartner

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Arista's sub 500 Nanosecond switch. Arista Networks announced the 7124SX, touting it as the "fastest switch in the world," with standard SFP+ interfaces. With sub-500 nanosecond latency, the Arista 7124SX is ideal for financial trading and ultra low latency applications as a leaf or access top-of-rack 10Gigabit Ethernet switch.  The new switch is a wire-speed, 24 port Layer 2/3 switch and supports 100Mb, 1GbE and 10GbE SFP+ based optics and cables in one rack unit. The switch not only represents a highly efficient and compact design, but improves latency by 20 percent - over 100 nanoseconds, according to Arista. The product is available immediately and starts at $12,995.  Arista also introduced Latency Analyzer (LANZ), a new software capability to monitor and analyze network performance, generate early warning of pending congestion events, and track sources of bottlenecks. Arista will be at the GigaOm Big Data conference in New York next week.

XO unveils cloud security solution.  XO Communications (XOHO) announced the launch of its new cloud-based security solution that offers businesses the ability to more quickly and cost-effectively deploy and manage comprehensive network security capabilities across their enterprise networks. XO Enterprise Cloud Security delivers network security capabilities delivered through the XO network as a security as a service offering. Capabilities able to be delivered include network based firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, secure web gateway for web and content filtering, and secure remote access to corporate network. “XO Enterprise Cloud Security significantly expands our security services portfolio and represents the continuing expansion of our cloud-based services delivery strategy,” said Mike Toplisek, chief marketing officer for XO Business Services at XO Communications. “By offering network security as a service, mid-sized businesses and larger enterprises can simplify the management of their security requirements and leverage our expertise to provide a unified threat management solution across their enterprise.”

Gartner examines key data center issues. At the Infrastructure, Operations and Data Center Summit in Sydney Tuesday Gartner highlighted four key forces operating in the market today that could result in data center space requirements that will shrink dramatically before the decade is out. "In the world of IT, everything has cascade effects, and in data centers the traditional methods of design no longer work without understanding the outside forces that will have an impact on data center costs, size and longevity," said David Cappuccio,managing vice president and chief of research for infrastructure at Gartner. "However, these very forces can actually work in your favor, providing the means to apply innovative designs, reduce capital costs and operating costs, increase long term scale, and keep up with the business." The recommendations for designing and operating a data center of the future were to focus on smarter designs, the 'greening of IT', conquering desnsity, and cloud computing. Additional information on these recommendations and the topic can be found in the Gartner report "Shrinking Data Centers: Your Next Data Center Will Be Smaller Than You Think."