Arista targets at Big Data, IP storage with 100G to leaf switches
- 15 July, 2014 23:23
Arista Networks this week unveiled a fixed configuration top-of-rack switch with 100G Ethernet uplinks for congestion-sensitive big data, streaming video and IP storage workloads.
Arista also rolled out extensions to its EOS operating system software, and optical transceivers that allow users to deploy 40G Ethernet over single or multimode fiber.
+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Arista fires broadside at Cisco/Insieme with new switches+
The new switch is the 7280E. In addition to 2x100G uplinks, it features 48 10G ports and 9GB of packet memory to alleviate congestion and dropped packets, and increase application performance by 7x.
With that much memory, the 7280E has 1000x more buffer memory than other leaf switches on the market, which typically have 9MB buffers, Arista says.
The 7280E also supports 36,000 ACL entries and VXLAN for scaling VLANs beyond 4,096. The 100G uplinks, meanwhile, scale better than 40G uplinks which were saturated by just four 10G flows, Arista says. With that particular feature, Arista beats most of its competitors to market with 100G uplinks on leaf switches most are equipped with 40G uplinks.
The enhancements to EOS include Smart System Upgrade, which allows enterprises to perform hitless software upgrades across Arista switches with zero downtime. Previously, Arista required 30 seconds of downtime to upgrade its EOS software while competitive switches typically require two hours, according to Arista.
Other EOS enhancements include Tap Aggregation Manager, Deep Packet Inspection and traffic steering that allows network operators to select the flows that need monitoring. EOS also now supports OpenFlow 1.3 on Arista's 7500E spine switches, which enables users to deploy them in 100G OpenFlow SDNs like that operated by the Internet2 research network.
The optical transceivers are standards compliant, Arista says, and designed to enable 40G over a single pair of either multimode or singlemode fiber to aid in the migration from 10G to 40G. The Universal QSFP optics have a reach of 150m over multimode fiber and 500m over singlemode fiber, and can also interoperate with IEEE LR4 based devices, Arista says
The Arista 7280E switches are in customer trials now with general availability in August 2014. They cost $550 per 10G port.
The Universal 40G transceiver is orderable now.
The Smart System Upgrade feature for EOS 7050X is available in beta releases now on Arista's 7050X leaf switches and will be generally available by late 2014.
