Arista Networks today unveiled a new line of high-throughput campus switches designed to cope with the increased bandwidth demands of WiFi 6 access points and IoT devices.

The 750 and 720 series switches join Arista's Cognitive Campus product line, which was announced last year in a bid to address rising numbers of clients, users, and IoT devices. The portfolio benefits from Arista's artificial intelligence capabilities, which enable real-time analytics and visibility across the vendor's wireless and LAN switching portfolio.

The higher throughput-per-stream of WiFi 6 access points poses a challenge for traditional campus switching, explained Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief development officer and co-founder of Arista in a blog post. "The latest enterprise-grade WiFi 6 access points, such as the Arista C-260, support four-by-four 5 GHz streams with a total throughput of 4.8 Gb/s," he wrote.

As a result, Bechtolsheim said that campus switching hardware is now becoming the bottleneck. "The combined traffic from all connected WiFi 6 access points passes through the uplinks of the campus switch, which means that the uplink bandwidth of the switch determines the ultimate performance as seen by all the users and devices."

To address this challenge, Arista's 750 and 720 series switches support 100 Gb/s uplinks, with the former capable of a combined 400 Gb/s of throughput.

The 720 series switches feature 96 gigabit Ethernet ports with the choice of 25 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s uplinks, as well as support for power-over-Ethernet (PoE) up to 60 watts.

The modular 750 series switches feature four 100 Gb/s uplinks and support for either five or eight-slot configurations with up to 240 and 384 ports respectively. The 750 series also supports PoE up to 90 watts.

Bechtolsheim claims the 750 series switches offer five times the throughput of competing campus switches.

Additionally, both switches feature integrated media access control security (MACSec) on all ports, ensuring that all data remains encrypted from the router to the switch, and from the switch to the access point.

Due to the long life cycles endured by campus switches, it's "crucial for customers to chose a platform that is future proof in terms of throughput," Bechtolsheim wrote.

Both the 720 and 750 series switches will begin shipping later this year.