Arista Networks Datacenter : Arista 7500 E High End Switches

Today I am going to talk about one of the new vendor in the market named as Arista Networks who came up with the high end Switches. Although Arista Networks have many switches in their portfolio but specifically I am going to talk about the Arista 7500E switches.

Arista 7500E come up with two different models. These switches are generally for the core switching as they have the high switching capacity. 

These models are Arista 7504E and Arista 7508E. Arista 7500E Series modular systems are high performance data center switches, available in a compact 7RU (4-slot) or 11RU (8-slot) they combine scalable L2 and L3 forwarding and traffic management with advanced features for network monitoring, precision timing, and network virtualization to deliver deterministic network performance for mission critical data centers, cloud computing, enterprise and HPC environments.

Arista 7500E switches generally used in datacenter as a Spine switches.

Fig 1.1- Arista Data center Spine-Leaf Architecture

Arista 7504E Switch
Let's talk about Arista 7504E high end Switch. So this switch have 4 slot with 7RU space and have capabilities of L2 and L3 switching.

• Talking about the switching capacity, this switch has the capacity of 15Tbps 
• Now for the line card capacity, the switch will provide you 3.84Tbps/Line card capacity.
• You can have maximum of 576 x 10Gbps of interfaces
• You can have maximum of 144 x 40 Gbps interfaces
• You can have maximum of 48 x 100 Gbps interfaces

Yes this switch can be used in the datacenter as well in the campus network in the core and distribution layer. Arista is challenging Cisco, Juniper in the datacenter and the enterprise Switching portfolio.

Arista 7508E Switch

Let's talk about Arista 7508E high end Switch. So this switch have 8 slot with 11RU space and have capabilities of L2 and L3 switching

• Talking about the switching capacity, this switch has the capacity of 30Tbps 
• Now for the line card capacity, the switch will provide you 3.84Tbps/Line card capacity.
• You can have maximum of 1152 x 10Gbps of interfaces
• You can have maximum of 288 x 40 Gbps interfaces
• You can have maximum of 96 x 100 Gbps interfaces

Line cards in Arista 7500E switches

Now let's talk about the line cards used in the Arista 7500E switches. Below is the comparison showing the Line card details used in the switches

Fig 1.1- Line Cards for Arista 7500E Switches 

Arista 7500E Series linecards offer a choice of speed and density options addressing 1Gb, 10Gb, 40Gb and 100Gb Ethernet requirements with a consistent set of features. Each module provides low latency under 4usec and is designed for optimum power efficiency.

High Availability and High Performance Fabric Modules

• Redundant Supervisor, Fabric, Fans and In Service Software Upgrades
• Self-healing stateful fault repair and Stateful Supervisor Switchover
• 100% efficient utilization of fabric capacity at all packet sizes
• 30Tbps Fabric and N+1 redundancy to ensure no loss of performance

Other Features in Datacenter or Campus which can be achieve by Arista 7500E Switch

1. Flat Layer-2 MLAG Spine - All Active Multipathing

• Standards based protocols (LACP)
• Eliminates Spanning Tree from the topology
• Simple to understand and easy to deploy

2. ECMP - All Active Multipath for Layer 3

• Standards based protocols (OSPF, IS-IS, BGP)
• Eliminates L2 for exceptional scalability and fault tolerance
• Exceptional scale with consistent performance in 2 tiers

3. VXLAN - Layer 2 over Layer 3 - Best of both worlds

• Active multipath using ECMP (up to 64-way)
• Single L3 network for all applications
• L2 extensions for stateful VM - VM over Layer 3
• Extends L2 with exceptional scalability (16 million virtual networks)