New Arista Switch Beefs Up Network Scale and Speed

Arista_7500_Portfolio

Arista Networks announced several new features to its flagship 7500 modular switching platform Wednesday. With enhancements to density, scale and speed, Arista says the 7500E is its fastest and most scalable Ethernet switch ever, and will enable cloud networks to scale to over 100,000 servers and and millions of virtual machines while delivering a network architecture that can concurrently support cloud, big data, web 2.0, and virtualization.

"The 7500E Series is a major engineering achievement, offering the industry’s highest throughput and three times the capability of the original Arista 7500 in every dimension - performance, density and power without a chassis upgrade," said 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."

The Arista 7500E offers configurations with a choice of 152 ports supporting 10GbE, 288 ports for 40GbE or 96 100GbE wire-speed ports. Key enhancements include 3x fabric bandwidth at 30 Terabits per second, 3x packet buffer at 144 Gigabyte per switch, 3x the control plane performance, triple the power efficiency at less than 4 watts per 10GbE port, and a triple-speed 10/40/100GbE line card.

New Line Cards, SDN Features

Four new line cards are available for the 7500E, including the 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. All line cards offer the same deep packet buffers that support 128 MBytes per 10G port,512 MBytes per 40G port and 1.5 GBytes per 100G port, large L2/L3 lookup tables, and wire-speed VXLAN processing on every port.

The Arista 7500E together with Arista EOS, includes Software Defined Networking capabilities that support programmatic control of the switch. With a Layer-3 load-balancing architecture, a universal cloud networking infrastructure can be built to support data centers with more than 100,000 servers that deliver consistent performance for dynamically scaling workloads in public or private clouds.

"The high density 40GbE and 100GbE interfaces, deep packet buffers, SDN features and the robustness of EOS makes the Arista 7500 an ideal spine platform for our network," said 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."

The 7500E series switches and line-card modules are generally available now.