Arista Networks recently announced the Arista 7500R Series, a switching and routing platform for cloud service provider and for next generation enterprise data centres. Arista’s Universal Spine architecture drives scale and agile workload mobility across public, private and hybrid clouds.
“The Arista 7500R allows Netflix to provide the ultimate user experience while keeping costs in check. Arista's continuous innovation has resulted in novel CDN (Content Delivery Network) architectures, offering breakthrough price/performance at 10x more bandwidth at 1/10th the price of a traditional router,” said Dave Temkin, Vice President of Global Networks at Netflix.
Industry’s first switch & router combination for cloud networking
The Arista 7500R Series builds upon the very successful Arista’s 7500E Series and provides unprecedented 100GbE density and large table sizes in a single chassis with appropriate investment protection. Key attributes of the modular form factor are:
1. Chassis Fabric capacity of up to 115 Tbps
2. Up to 432 wirespeed 100GbE ports in a choice of three form factors
3. 288 Gigabytes of deep and smart packet memory for reliable packet transfers
- Virtual Output Queues (VoQ) for lossless forwarding
4. Agile port speeds of 1/10/25/40/50/100GbE
5. FlexRoute™ technology delivers up to 1 Million wire speed routes with MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), Segment Routing and EVPN (Ethernet Virtual Private Network) protocol support
6. Programmable traffic engineering with up to 128,000 MPLS, GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation), VXLAN (Virtual Extensible Local Area Network) and IP-in-IP tunnels
7. Support for NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) compliance for Service Provider deployments
8. Mix and Match across the wide selection of 7500E and 7500R series line-card options.
9. A choice of three new wire speed 7500R Series line cards:
- 36 x 100GbE QSFP - choice of 10/25/40/50/100GbE
- 36 x 40GbE with flexible combinations of 10GbE and up to 6 ports of 100GbE
- 48 x 10GbE SFP+ and 2 x 100G QSFP
“The 7500R is the highest performance switching and routing platform that supports the full Internet routing table, enabling a Universal Spine in cloud-scale networks,” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, Arista’s Chairman and Chief Development Officer.
New Spine subsumes core functions
With the introduction of scalable two-tier active Leaf-Spine and single tier Spline options, Arista cloud network designs allow resilient and highly available access between applications inside a data centre. With evolving traffic patterns, the traditional core routing layer can now be replaced with an Arista 7500R series-based spine for rapid re-convergence and network-wide resilience between data centres and to the Internet.
The Arista 7500R Series supports familiar MPLS functions allowing up to 13-labels deep packet lookup for programmatic control across the largest networks. Along with the state oriented architecture of Arista’s Network–wide Database NetDB and SDK, Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) users can customise their own preferred path across the largest networks in the world, instead of relying on best-effort forwarding on the Internet. Support for newer protocols including Segment Routing and EVPN allows for transitions to new-age traffic engineered networks without the overhead of legacy stacks.
The Arista 7500R Series challenges legacy network designs based on Places In the Network (PINs) silos for core, branch, data centre and edge routing. It consolidates functions across the PINs with mega-scale universal spine while enhancing storage networks and edge router topologies.
