Arista Enhances Its Modular Switching Platform

Arista Networks has announced significant enhancements to its flagship Arista 7500 modular switching platform that enables Cloud Networks to scale to over 100,000 servers and 1 Million virtual machines while delivering the first network architecture that can concurrently support cloud, Big Data, Storage, Web2.0, and Virtualisation.

With the fully programmable Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) software, customers can now achieve the level of automation necessary to build true Software Defined Networks.

The Arista 7500E offers 1,152 10GbE, 288 40GbE, or 96 100GbE wire-speed ports, making the Arista 7500E a fast and scalable datacentre Ethernet switch in the industry.

“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 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.

The Arista 7500E together with Arista EOS, delivers a set of advanced Software Defined Networking 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 virtualisation

• 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 virtualisation 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 datacentres 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 virtualisation.