Arista Networks, a data switch vendor, today announced the newest addition to its Arista 7000 family of data center switches, the Arista 7500 Series. Arista 7500 is designed to deliver increased throughput, and leverage performance, density, and deeper buffering to support data center virtualization and cloud computing.
Arista 7500 can forward on all ports at Layer-2 and Layer-3 at wirespeed while simultaneously switching and routing unicast and multicast traffic, the vendor says. There are eight linecard modules in the system and each linecard provides 720 Mps of throughput. Aggregated together, the system can forward 5.76Bpps. The linecard modules are always non-blocking. The new switches also support up to 192 port-pairs, and full-mesh traffic patterns.
The low-latency virtual output queue fabric (VOQ) and an advanced traffic scheduler results in minimal delay in forwarding. All packets are received and stored on the ingress packet processor, which is equipped with very deep buffers. In parallel, while storing the packets, a forwarding decision is made by the scheduler as quickly as possible and the packet is divided and sent across the fabric to the egress port(s). The packet is re-assembled and transmitted out in most cases without any delays. This results in a very low latency - under 5 microseconds on average, for standard Ethernet frame sizes.
With 384 MB of packet buffer for every eight ports, data gets queued when the egress interfaces are experiencing wide fan-in of traffic, or when supporting 10Gb to 1Gb transitions. The deep buffers ensure that congestion is absorbed and the egress interfaces are always working at their most efficient, Arista claims. This minimizes retransmission and results in much better performance at the application level. This ability to handle congestion, along with hardware support for Priority Flow Control (PFC), makes the system suitable for applications that require a lossless fabric such as IP Storage, NAS, and video origination services, the vendor states.
The Arista 7500 switch comes with 6 fabric modules. Each fabric provides 1.66 Tbps of switching capacity. Only 5 fabrics are needed at any given time to provide full non-blocking performance.
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