Arista upgrades R-Series spine and leaf network portfolio with new line cards, systems

June 20, 2017
Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) has unveiled new line cards for its Arista 7280R Universal Leaf and 7500R Universal Spine platforms, as well as a new members of each family. The company backed up the announcements with supporting quotes from a security-as-a-service provider and an internet exchange operator to signal the applicability of the platforms to cloud providers, content delivery network (CDN) operators, and internet service providers.

Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) has unveiled new line cards for its Arista 7280R Universal Leaf and 7500R Universal Spine platforms, as well as a new members of each family. The company backed up the announcements with supporting quotes from a security-as-a-service provider and an internet exchange operator to signal the applicability of the platforms to cloud providers, content delivery network (CDN) operators, and internet service providers.

The new hardware includes:

  • The 16-slot 7516R Series to support spines of up to 15 Petabits and 576 ports of 100G, with future support for 400G
  • The expanded 7280R2 with up to 60 ports of 100G, IEEE 802.3by 25G Ethernet, and more than 2 million routes in hardware
  • Data center interconnect capabilities with 802.1AE MACsec encryption on 36-port 100G line cards and coherent 200G DWDM line cards with reach of over 5000 km.

The new hardware leverages Arista's FlexRoute and AlgoMatch software within the Arista EOS umbrella. The FlexRoute enhancements apply to the 7500R2 line cards and the 7280R2 fixed platforms and enable support for more than 2 million routes in hardware. AlgoMatch, also on the 7500R2 line cards and 7280R fixed platforms, supports high-rate sFlow to improve traffic analysis for routing use cases. AlgoMatch also provides ACL scale and the common IPv4 and IPv6 scale that enable access control policies to be deployed in edge routing roles. This feature plays well with new 256-bit MACsec capable line cards for the 7500R family.

As mentioned, Arista lined up a pair of customers to endorse the new feature set.

"Working together with Arista has helped Netnod to develop a flexible, future-proof infrastructure that accommodates significant increases in capacity at the same time as reducing the cost per terabit compared with traditional routing platforms," said Lars Michael Jogbäck, CEO at Netnod, an internet exchange provider. "Arista 7500R/7280R and EOS support our next-generation platform as we develop industry-leading IX services and offer Netnod customers more connection options than ever before."

"We selected Arista EOS and the 7500R2 as a part of our new edge architecture, which will become the foundation for our hyper-scale security platform. This was based on the combination of deep telemetry, dense 100G, and large routing scale, while providing stability and extensibility with Arista EOS," added Wen Temitim, chief network scientist at StackPath.

The 7500R2/7280R2 Series platforms are available now. The 7516 is currently in customer trials, says Arista, with general availability in the second half of this year.

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