Arista’s new switches support 800 GbE for hyperscalers
Arista introduced its first 800GbE switch as part of its 7060X5 series for hyperscalers and cloud providers. Arista also launched five new systems in its 7050X4 series for businesses with high-performance computing systems.
Two of the three new members of the hyperscale-focused 7060X5 family house 32 ports that support 800GbE. The latest additions to the enterprise 7050X4 family offer high port density and increased flexibility, supporting 10GbE to 400GbE.
“They both have the same type of telemetry and traffic scheduling capabilities, the same type of memory,” said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at ZK Research. “Because of the speed, they’re actually intended for two different audiences.”
Hyperscalers and enterprise data centers are moving in the same direction but at different speeds, said Hardev Singh, data center platform leader at Arista Networks. The 7060X5 series for bandwidth-intensive hyperscalers goes up to 800GbE for data center interconnect or backbone connectivity.
“At the end of the day, they want more bandwidth at the lowest cost,” Singh said.
The 7050X4 series supports companies that build high performance computing (HPC) and the use of next-generation applications based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, Singh said.
“What’s important for enterprise customers is having that flexibility and backwards compatibility with their existing infrastructure,” he said.
The new switches in the two series highlight the growing divide between the needs of hyperscale data centers and enterprise data centers, said Brad Casemore, vice president of research at IDC.
“Hyperscalers continue to really push the envelope with respect to data center switching bandwidth and density,” Casemore said. “Enterprises have less need for this cutting-edge bandwidth, but they need a greater variety of functions because their environments are so diverse.”
The five new Arista products in the 7050X4 series use the Broadcom Trident 4 chipset which delivers 8.0 Tbps. They offer 10GbE/25GbE, 50GbE/100GbE, and 400GbE links in fabric layers with flat topologies for east-west traffic.
The switches support the cabling and fiber customers already have in their data centers, so they don’t have to make changes as they adopt higher gigabit speeds, Casemore said.
The three new ones from Arista 7060X5 The products use the Broadcom Tomahawk 4 chipset, which offers 25.6 terabits of total bandwidth. Two are 32-port 800GbE switches, one with QSFP-DD ports and the other with OSFP ports.
All new switches offer in-band telemetry for latency monitoring, traffic scheduling, high-performance shared buffer memory, and increased routing and access control lists. They also have 20-40% power savings, SFP and QSPF based systems for diverse computing connectivity and feature parity and scale with extensible virtual LAN support.
Arista offers investment protection and better power utilization for both hyperscalers and enterprises, even if their requirements differ, Casemore said.
“Hyperscalers will continue to advance at this breakneck pace at ever-increasing speeds, and will also likely have ever-increasing demand for switches as they build data centers around the world,” Casemore said. “Enterprises will have a slower cadence, but will still need a data center change to suit their requirements.”
Mary Reines joined TechTarget in October 2022 as a Network News Writer. Prior to TechTarget, Reines worked for five years as an art editor at the marble head reporter, the newspaper of his hometown. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she served as assistant news editor for the student newspaper, the daily schoolboy.