Switch and routing giant Arista launched a pair of products targeted at extreme low-latency requirements of the financial market. The products also mark an integration milestone for Arista following its Metamako acquisition in 2018.

The first new product is the 7130LBR switch, which sports 96 front panel ports in a 1-rack unit (RU) case. Inside, the switch uses Broadcom’s Jericho2 switching silicon, a pair of 48-port FPGAs, and runs Arista’s EOS software.

David Snowdon, director of engineering at Arista, explained that this single-unit integration is a key component to cutting down on network and application latency. He explained that traditional copper or fiber connections used to connect different boxes incur around five nanoseconds of latency per meter, “which nowadays is actually quite a significant amount in the grand scheme of things.”

This latency reduction is important for financial services that rely on milliseconds to maximize the value of their trading transactions.

“These firms are very latency sensitive, and this becomes a bigger issue as they move to scale out their infrastructure deployments,” Snowdon said.

Another interesting device feature is that it includes six quad small form-factor pluggable – double density (QSFP-DD) ports that run at a modest 10 Gb/s. Snowden explained that the technology can support much higher throughput, but doing so comes at the expense of higher latency.

“400-gig interfaces are actually quite complicated to decode,” Snowdon said, adding that 100-gig is also a challenge. “10-gig and 25-gig are actually the right place to be for these particular devices. It’s like ‘Back to the Future,’ the right standard to optimize is actually 10-gig even though it’s a 10-year-old technology.”

The second device is the 7130B switch, which is a 2-RU form factor powered by Intel’s Tofino chip. This device sports 256 front panel ports, an integrated P4 programmable switch chip, and also runs Arista’s EOS software.

Snowdon explained that this product provides a 2.5-times increase in performance density compared to previous products.

That performance density for each device also allows for a much smaller footprint and corresponding decrease in power consumption.

Arista claims that a pair of 7130LBR devices consuming two RUs has the same performance as at least eight current devices taking up 11 RUs. This consolidation results in 75% less footprint, 75% less cabling, and a 65% reduction in power consumption.

The 7130B impact is even greater. Arista notes that just a single, 2 RU device has the performance of at least 9 current devices that would take up at least 17 RUs. The corresponding footprint consolidation eliminates the need for any cabling, which results in more than an 80% reduction in latency and 90% reduction in power consumption.

“As soon as you don't have to have that many devices, you don't need that many CPUs, you don’t need that many task-flows, you don't need to run multiple fans. … That's just a lot less power because of just less devices,” Snowdon said.

John Peach, senior director of product management at Arista, added that this size consolidation also results in real estate cost savings for users.

“Where these networks are deployed, they're typically deployed in extremely expensive and they’re not very generous for power and cooling in trading and colocation environments,” Peach said. “These rack units might be costing thousands of dollars per month per rack unit, and that's before you even think about sticking your servers in there that are actually paying the bills.”

The latest product releases follow on updates last year to the 7130-series switches. That move introduced Arista’s Extensible Operating System (EOS) management platform to the 7130-series switches, alongside a new extension called SwitchApp that allows users to achieve latencies as low as 100 nanoseconds when using traditional network topologies.

The platforms also build on Arista’s acquisition of Metamako in 2018, which brought that vendor’s FPGA expertise and its flagship MetaConnect layer-1 switch. The new products rely on that Metamako technology for the layer-1 connectivity with the integrated chip and software support running on layer 2 and layer 3.

Peach explained that the new platforms are “the first baby” of that acquisition.

“The previous effort was to make sure that the 7130 devices that came as part of the Metamako acquisition were able to fit into the EOS software family,” Peach said. “What you see in these two new platforms is a complete collaborative effort on new devices. They're designed and built using the traditional Arista style and Arista operating system, but with the full know how of the Metamako team for the layer 1 and FPGA side of things. This is the first baby of the acquisition.”