Arista Networks today announced its 7500E ‘E’ Series switch that provides a 30Tbps non-blocking network fabric capable of forwarding 14 Billion packets per second, with at most 5 microseconds of latency between any two ports. Powered by a different family of Broadcom chipsets (from its Dune acquisition apparently) instead of the Trident 2, and unlike its 7150 switch based on Intel’s FM 6000, the switch also boasts an impressively low 4W per port power consumption.

In a 11RU package, the 7500E manages to pack multiple ports in configurations of 1152 10GbE, 288 40GbE or 96 100GbE with its triple-speed support of 10, 40 and 100 GBps interfaces. With a 144GB buffer per switch, the 7500E also provides flexible queue tuning with its VOQ (virtual output queues) architecture, applying less buffering to low-latency applications or more buffering to loss-sensitive applications. These buffers allow the switch to handle congestion-causing scenarios (like during a job shuffle step in a Hadoop cluster, or vMotion initiation in a VMware cluster) without degrading overall performance.

Although built on a different chipset, the 7500E continues to support Arista’s LANZ and DANZ capabilities, allowing for fine-grained time-stamping with rules-based triggered capture and tap aggregation capabilities first announced in the 7150 series. Another cool innovation is their RAIL (Rapid automatic link loss detection) feature, which detects that a specific IP behind a port is down and can send TCP RST (resets) or ICMP unreachable messages proactively to force application-layer recovery to converge in seconds versus many minutes (up to 12 minutes in some situations).  This along with their health tracer application helps provide better troubleshooting and uptime.

Furthermore, the 7500E supports VXLAN and can act as a hardware VTEP to terminate and translate VXLAN tunnels to VLANs, allowing integration of physical networks with overlay networks. And in a 32-way two-tier  spine/leaf  topology, this translates into a potentially flat network of 111K ports, and assuming 10 VMs per port, 1M VMs!

On the hardware side, integrated optics provide significant cost savings, up to 10X in the cast of 100GbE compared to other switches—most notably Cisco’s Nexus switching lines. Furthermore, Arista claims a 2X density improvement, an 8X less power consumption and a 5X reduction in port-to-port latency when compared to Cisco’s solution. Jayshree and many members of the Cisco alumni at Arista are clearly taking aim at their former employer, and in a significant way.

Arista continues to tout its EOS, with similar programmable eAPIs on the 7500E. One thing that is missing though is OpenFlow capabilities, which today are only supported on their 7050 switch line (powered by Broadcom’s Trident+). They indicate that they will add support based on customer demand.

The 7500E is in trials now (notably at Cornell University's Medical College) and will be GA in Q2 2013.

Pricing is: 10GbE @ $550 per port
40GbE @ $2,200 per port
100GbE @ $10,000 per port w/ integrated optics.

SDxCentral’s take:

• This is a significant shot across the bow for Cisco, especially after Cisco upstaged Arista's 7150 low-latency announcement with their Nexus 3548 Monticello-ASIC based solution. We will see strong competition at enterprises and cloud service providers, given the 7500E's key advantages in power consumption, space-savings and latency.
• The scale and performance of the 7500E is impressive, even compared to some other recent switch announcements we have seen from other networking vendors. When combined with other switches in the Arista family, the 7500E can form the heart of many cloud-scale datacenters today, supporting strong east-west connectivity and network overlay technology based on VXLAN.
• While there isn't support for OpenFlow, the use case of this switch seems to be focused on supporting virtual overlay network deployments in large scale datacenters--in those situations, it's still unclear that OpenFlow is the best SDN solution to enable network virtualization.

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Original Press Release follows:Arista Introduces The Industry’s Fastest Data Center SwitchArista 7500 Delivers Unprecedented Cloud-Scale Performance and Programmability
SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 1, 2013 – Arista Networks today announced the Arista 7500 ‘E’ Series that enables Cloud Networking designs to go from 1,000 to over 100,000 servers and 1+ million virtual machines interconnected in a flat network. With the highly programmable Arista EOS (extensible operating system) software, customers can now achieve the level of automation necessary in building Software-Defined Networking based public and private cloud offerings.Best 10/40/100GbE density with Triple Factor NetworkingThe Arista 7500 Family now offers a 30 Terabit fabric and 14 Billion packets per second of non-blocking L2/L3 and VXLAN performance, making the Arista 7500 the fastest and most scalable data center switch. Key highlights of the 7500E series modules are:

• Triple-Speed Support for 10/40/100GbE
• Triple the fabric bandwidth at 30 terabits per second per switch
• Three configurations in 11RU: 1,152 10GbE, 288 40GbE or 96 100GbE
• Three times the packet buffer at 144 Gigabyte per switch
• Three times the control plane performance
• Triple the power efficiency at less than 4 watts/port
• Three modes of operation: L2, L3 and VXLAN design options

“We are applying Moore’s Law to networking to meet the growing need for higher application performance in data centers and cloud centers. The 7500 ‘E’ series modules offer three times the capability in every key dimension - performance, density and power without chassis upgrades” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chairman and Chief Development Officer at Arista Networks.

Investment Protection at Triple-Speed:

Arista 7500E Series is an engineering feat of excellence preserving existing network architectures while allowing the migration to cloud networks for Hadoop, Big Data, HPC, Web2.0 and end-to-end network virtualization. It includes four new linecard modules for 10/40/100Gigabit Ethernet switching, Supervisor and Fabric system offering seamless investment protection with the present 7500 systems.

The 7500E Series delivers an industry-first triple-speed 10/40/100G module that has embedded optics. The same line card can be software configured on a per port basis delivering linear price-per gigabit at every port speed. These Integrated optics in the line card modules offer a ten-fold reduction in the cost of deploying 100GbE. Retaining single binary EOS image consistency, the 7500E Series delivers self-healing resilience and programmatic control to every aspect of the switch.

“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 it's Linux based EOS and was a key factor in deciding on the 7500E for our Big Data needs."

SDN Innovations Outpace the Industry

The Arista 7500 Family is also based on a state-of-the-art programmable networking operating system, Arista EOS, running on the 7500E, delivers salient SDN capabilities never available before in modular switches for reduced operating expenses, programmable automation and open orchestration

SDN Features include:

• Integrated packet broker capabilities for tap-aggregation with Arista DANZ for traffic visibility and monitoring
• Rapid Automated Indicator of Link-Loss (RAIL) for accelerated convergence in Big Data analytics and Hadoop applications
• VM Tracer and VXLAN for network wide workload mobility and virtualization
• Health Tracer for switch level diagnostics and traceability of all key performance 
indicators

Pricing and Availability 
The 7500 E series switches and line-card modules are generally available now. Entry level US list prices start at $99,995 for the switch and $10,000 per 100GbE port, $2,200 per 40GbE and under $600 per 10GbE port.

About Arista Networks

The company was founded to deliver software-defined cloud networking solutions for large data center and computing environments. Arista’s award- winning 10 GbE switches redefine scalability, robustness, and price– performance, with more than one million cloud networking ports being deployed worldwide. At the core of Arista's platform is EOS, the world’s most advanced network operating system. Arista Networks products are available worldwide through distribution partners, systems integrators and resellers.
Additional information and resources on today's announcement can be found at: http://www.aristanetworks.com

Press Contact:

Amanda Jaramillo

Arista Networks

[email protected]

(408) 547-5798