Arista Launches 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switching Platform

Arista's breakthrough 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) switching platform offers 384 wirespeed ports and an aggregate of 10T bps of capacity for Layer 2/3 switching. The company said the platform would also deliver 40G and 100G bps Ethernet interfaces in the future.

Arista Networks introduced the Arista 7500, a switching platform for maximizing data center performance, efficiency and overall network reliability. Introduced at the High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets trade show in New York, the 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) switching platform, which offers 10 terabits per second of switching capacity and 384 wirespeed L2/L3 10GbE ports in 11 rack units, was specifically designed to address demanding customer requirements for cloud computing, virtualization and mission-critical data centers. The company boasted it is five times faster, with one-tenth the power draw per wirespeed port and one-half the footprint, compared to other modular data center switches.

The Arista 7500 supports an L2/L3 throughput of 5.76 billion packets per second in a single chassis - the platform will also deliver 40G and 100G bps Ethernet interfaces in the future, the company said in a release. A low-latency, non-blocking fabric enables traffic to be carried without loss, enabling large-scale data center consolidation and improved server efficiency. The Arista 7500 Series starts at $140,000 and a fully configured system costs less than $1,200 per wirespeed port, the company announced. The Arista 7500 is available now.

"Cloud networking requires a new class of scale, price/performance, and resilience previously not addressed with existing modular switches," said Jayshree Ullal, president and chief executive officer of Arista Networks. "The introduction of the Arista 7500 is significant and transformational to customers and the 10GbE market - this platform ushers in the next phase of the data center industry."

The Arista 7500 runs EOS, Arista's Extensible Operating System. Built with a modular software design with a multiprocess, state sharing architecture, EOS offers open access to Linux tools, extensible network services, and allows for integration with third-party applications. EOS provides a single binary image across all Arista networking platforms and offers features such as stateful fault repair and in-service software upgrades. A two-tier design of Arista 7500 spine switches and Arista leaf switches can support more than 8,000 servers with over 100,000 cores.

"The Arista 7500 is a fundamental advance in the state-of-the-art of data center Ethernet switching," said Andy Bechtolsheim, Arista's chairman and chief development officer.

"This platform was designed and engineered with the performance and capability to continue to scale and address the most challenging and demanding data center requirements, including future 40Gb and 100Gb Ethernet."