Arista takes on the network big boys with switchin 'n' routing gear

Arista is taking on the big boys of Cisco and Juniper with its new switching and routing platform for cloud service providers and enterprise data centres.

The Arista 7500R “universal spine” device combines the functions of a high speed modular switch and a router. It is based on Broadcom’s “Jericho” silicon enhanced with routing code in Arista’s EOS operating system.

Martin Hull, senior director of product management at Arista, told our sister site The Next Platform that the device will improve the scale of networks while at the same time reducing complexity.

“What we have seen over the past few years is that cloud deployments just continue to grow,” he said. “Soon server shipments at cloud builders and other service providers are going to outstrip enterprises, and the largest cloud providers will account for about a third of Ethernet switch spending.”

Hull said that the largest 7500R system with the best price will cost about $3,000 per port, or about $1.3m, which works out to $750 per 25 Gb/sec downlink to the servers when it is used as a spine switch for the leaves.

Arista posted bumper full-year financial results last month, with sales up 43 per cent to $837.6m in 2015/16 compared with the previous year. Net income rose to $121.1m, up from $86.9m last year.

The company is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Cisco, which has accused the company of patent and copyright infringement. Earlier this year Arista Networks countersued Cisco, accusing the network giant of unfair competition practices.

The Arista 7500R Series builds upon the Arista’s 7500E and provides 100GbE density.

The router has up to 432 wirespeed 100GbE ports; 288 Gigabytes of deep and smart packet memory; and segment routing and Ethernet Virtual Private Network protocol support Programmable traffic engineering, with up to 128,000 MPLS, GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation),

It has a choice of three new wire speed 7500R Series line cards: 36 x 100GbE QSFP – a choice of 10/25/40/50/100GbE 36 x 40GbE with flexible combinations of 10GbE and up to six ports of 100GbE, 48 x 10GbE SFP+ and two 100G QSFP. ®