Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Arista's 7150 Switch Focuses on Low-Latency, Virtualized Data Centers


Arista Networks unveiled a new low-latency data center switch family designed for software-defined networking (SDN) in Big Data, Cloud Networks, Financial Trading, HPC and Web 2.0 environments. The new switches are designed to interoperate with SDN controllers for network-wide virtualization, virtual machine(VM) mobility and network services.

The new Arista 7150 Series offers up to 64 wire-speed 1/10 GbE ports or 16 40GbE ports.  Notably, the 7150 Series supports VXLAN tunnels at wire-speed, supporting workload mobility between physical and virtual machines.

In terms of performance, Arista achieves 40GbE port-to-port latency of 350 nanoseconds for Layer 2/3 forwarding. The switches support advanced network services, such as Network Address Translation, IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol, and congestion management.

Arista said the wire speed Network Address Translation (NAT) capabilities eliminate 100s of microseconds of forwarding delay in HPC and financial trading architectures. The advanced Latency Analyzer (LANZ+) functions provide application-level microburst detection, congestion monitoring and analysis essential to optimize big data and other performance-sensitive applications. The flexible forwarding path enables new packet formats to be parsed and forwarded with deterministic performance and provides investment protection. Along with open EOS APIs the 7150 Series offers monitoring, analysis and forensic capabilities for both coarse and fine-grained views of data flows and network activities; including stateless load balancing and network analyzer functionality. Additional AgilePort capability allows four individual 10Gb ports to be combined into a single 40Gb ports for further scale and simple network migrations.

"We are excited to collaborate with Arista on the 7150 Series, designed with the Intel® Ethernet Switch FM6000 silicon for flexible forwarding. Together with Programmable Arista EOS, new SDN functionality can be achieved with a common platform. Such versatility is a breakthrough innovation in the industry and a testament to the world-class design achieved by Arista and Intel working together," said Diane Bryant, Vice President and General Manager, Datacenter Group at Intel.

"Arista has combined a flexible forwarding data path with the Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) to deliver breakthrough latency, power, density and advanced SDN features in a compact 1U form-factor. The Arista 7150 is truly the first next generation SDN switch for virtualized data centers,” stated Andy Bechtolsheim, CDO and Chairman of Arista Networks.

http://www.aristanetworks.com