Arista Networks has a new high-end data center switch as well as several smaller switches designed to provide more configuration and upgrade options to meet the specific needs of each organization.
“Different customer use cases and application deployments within a single organization have different requirements. Each deployment requires a right-sized solution – few applications currently require 400G of bandwidth per server, but many organizations need to move away from 10 /25G does the groundwork,” Martin Hull, Arista’s vice president of product management for Cloud Titans and Platforms, wrote in a blog post about the new system.
“What we’ve seen over the last few years is that both sets of customers – hyperscalers and enterprises – are looking for the highest speed, density and performance and capacity options to take advantage of lower costs and power utilization, and that’s what we is a problem we aim to solve with our latest product additions,” Hull said.
At the high end, Arista has added a new switch to its 7060X5 series, a fixed 32 x 800G system that supports 25.6Tbps backplane and a choice of OSFP or QSFP-based optics. This gives the 7060X5 Series three 25.6Tbps-based systems to anchor high-end enterprise or hyperscale data center backbone environments: 1RU 128-port, 200G model; 2RU 64-port, 400G model; and new 1RU, 32-port, 800G switch.
Arista also added five new 7050X4 data center leaf switches, all based on a single 8Tbps packet processor.
The new devices offer various configurations supporting 10Gbps, 25Gbps, 50Gbps or 100Gbps in a familiar small form-factor pluggable (SFP) form factor, ensuring backward compatibility with a significant installed base of NRZ modulation-based 10Gbps and 25Gbps hosts, Hull said. The new chassis also supports 100Gbps and 200Gbps hosts based on 50G PAM4 and maintains the same rack-level density of 48 ports. Hull said the systems also provide customers with 400Gbps uplink ports for backbone connectivity, with speeds ranging from 100Gbps to 400Gbps Ethernet.
“As customers look to upgrade compute, HPC applications or storage systems, these applications require more robust networking and performance capabilities, driving a new set of requirements for network switches. This is what we are introducing in this new generation of switches,” Hull said.
The 7050X4 box also supports OSFP or QSFP-based optics, just like the 7060X5 series, which allows them to upgrade to new devices using the optics technology they want without having to forklift their legacy optics environment to support higher densities, Hull said.
The 7050X4 and 7060X5 platforms are based on Broadcom Trident4 and Tomahawk4 chipsets and will be available in the first quarter of 2023.