Arista expands high-end data center switch family to offer network speed, density and performance options

Arista Networks has a new high-end data-center switch as well as several smaller ones designed to provide more configuration and upgrade choices to fit the specific needs of individual organizations.

“Different customer use cases and application deployments within a single organization have differing requirements. Each deployment needs a right-sized solution—few applications need 400G of bandwidth per server today, but many organizations need to do the groundwork for the move away from 10/25G,” wrote Martin Hull, vice president of Cloud Titans and Platform Product Management with Arista in a blog about the new systems.

“What we have seen over the past few years is that both sets of customers—hyperscalers and enterprises—are looking for the highest speed, density and performance, and capacity options that take advantage of lower costs and power utilization, which is what we are aiming at addressing 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 a 25.6Tbps backplane and a choice of OSFP- or QSFP-based optics. That gives the 7060X5 Series three 25.6Tbps-based systems to anchor high-end enterprise or hyperscaler data-center spine environments: a 1RU 128 port, 200G model; a 2RU 64 port, 400G model; and the new 1RU, 32 port, 800G switch.

Arista has also added five new 7050X4 data-center leaf switches all based on a single 8Tbps packet processor.

The new devices offer a variety of configurations supporting 10Gbps, 25Gbps, 50Gbps, or 100Gbps in a familiar small form-factor pluggable (SFP) form factor, which ensures backward compatibility to the significant installed base of 10Gbps and 25Gbps hosts based on NRZ modulation, Hull stated. The new boxes also support 50G PAM4-based 100Gbps and 200Gbps hosts and retain the same rack level density of 48 ports. These systems also offer customers 400Gbps uplink ports for spine connectivity at a range of speeds from 100Gbps to 400Gbps Ethernet, Hull stated. 

“As customers look to upgrade compute, HPC applications or storage systems, those applications need stronger networking and performance capabilities that drive a new set of requirements for network switches. And it’s what we’re introducing with this new generation of switches,” Hull said.

The 7050X4 boxes also support OSFP or QSFP based optics, which like the 7060X5 Series, which enables upgrading to the new devices using the optical technology they want without having to forklift their legacy optical environment to support higher densities, Hull said.

The 7050X4 and 7060X5 platforms are based on the Broadcom Trident4 and Tomahawk4 chipsets and will be available in first quarter of 2023.