Arista switches target ultra-low latency networking demands

Arista Networks has unveiled a portfolio of 25G Ethernet switches aimed at supporting data center, financial, industrial control applications that demand high-performance and extremely low latency.

The new 7130 25G Series boxes are a significant power and features upgrade over the vendor’s current 7130 10G Ethernet line of devices and promise to reduce link latency 2.5-fold for data transmission by reducing queuing, serialization delays and eliminating the need for latency-inducing Forward Error Correction (FEC) typically required by 25G Ethernet, according to the vendor.   

In addition the new switches eliminate the need for multiple cables and switches to set up and support the current level of low-latency networks, according to Martin Hull, vice president of Cloud Titans and Platform Product Management with Arista Networks in a blog about the new switches.

Existing trade exchanges and other trading businesses and others requiring low-latency networks have run over 10G for over a decade and are now no longer able handle spikes and micro-bursts requiring higher bandwidth solutions, Mull stated.  Arista’s new 7130 Series 25G systems support standard optical connections and let customers upgrade networks to 25G Ethernet and maintain backward compatibility with existing solutions at 10G.

The three new 7130 Series systems look like this:

• 7132LB: Ultra-low latency Layer2/3 forwarding at 25GbE using Arista’s SwitchApp Layer 2 switching technology for time stamping. The 7130LB is based on the Broadcom Jericho chip and includes 48 SFP ports and six [Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable Double Density] QSFP–DD optical slots for a total of 96 front panel lanes.
• 7135LB: Integrated Layer 1 fabric with 10G and 25G switching with Arista MetaWatch traffic capturing technology to ensure fast aggregation and packet buffering.
• 7130B-32YD: High-density Layer 1 switch supporting 25GbE over all 256 links. It is the highest density L1 switch the company has ever developed, Arista stated. Based on the Intel Tofino chip the box features 32 OSPF-DD slots.

All three switches feature integrated fully programmable FPGAs which are compatible with apps written for the current 7130 Series and include dozens of software reconfigurable connections to each other, all in a single rack unit with twice the front panel port density of previous generation 7130 devices.

“This means that firms that were using one 7130 for market data distribution, aggregation and tapping and another 7130 for precise time stamping and a fixed configuration switch for latency insensitive routed traffic, all interconnected by dozens of cables can now deploy a single rack unit that can do it all saving latency, space and power,” Hull stated.

In addition, dozens of cables connect each layer one switch today — each cable carries a single signal or connection — with traditional switches service and other network devices. Deploying and managing these topologies is difficult and tedious The technology in the new boxes lets one cable carry up to eight connections, significantly reducing the wiring complexity and improving the port density, according to Arista. 

All three boxes run Arista’s flagship operating system, Extensible Operating System (EOS) and can be managed via a single dashboard on by the company’s core CloudVision management platform.

The 7132LB series is orderable today, while the 7135 Series is planned for Q4 ’23.  The 7130B Series will be orderable in Q1 ‘24.