Arista's new switches support 800GbE for hyperscalers

Arista introduced its first 800 GbE switch as part of its 7060X5 Series for hyperscalers and cloud providers. Arista also launched five new systems in its 7050X4 Series for enterprises with high-performance computing systems.

Two of the three new members of the hyperscale-focused 7060X5 family house 32 ports that support 800 GbE. The latest additions to the 7050X4 family for enterprises offer high-density ports and increased flexibility, supporting 10 GbE to 400 GbE.

"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 really meant for two different audiences."

The hyperscalers and the enterprise data centers are moving in the same direction but at different speeds, said Hardev Singh, lead of data center platforms at Arista Networks. The 7060X5 Series for bandwidth-hungry hyperscalers goes up to 800 GbE 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 provides support for enterprises building high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and using next-generation applications based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, Singh said.

"What's important to enterprise customers is to have that flexibility and backward compatibility to 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, research vice president at IDC.

"The hyperscalers continue to really push the envelope with respect to the bandwidth and density of data center switching," Casemore said. "The enterprises have less need for this cutting-edge bandwidth, but they need a greater range of features because their environments are so varied."

Arista's five new products in the 7050X4 series use the Broadcom Trident 4 chipset delivering 8.0 Tbps. They offer 10 GbE/25 GbE, 50 GbE/100 GbE and 400 GbE links at fabric layers with flat topologies for east-west traffic.

The switches support the cabling and fiber that customers already have in their data centers, so they don't have to make changes as they adopt higher gigabit speeds, Casemore said.

Arista's three new 7060X5 products use the Broadcom Tomahawk 4 chipset, delivering 25.6 terabits of total bandwidth. Two are 32-port 800 GbE switches, one with QSFP-DD ports and the other with OSFP ports.

All the 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 a 20% to 40% power savings, SFP & QSPF-based systems for diverse compute connectivity, and feature and scale parity with Virtual Extensible LAN support.

Arista offers investment protection and better power utilization for both hyperscalers and enterprises, even as their requirements differ, Casemore said.

"The hyperscalers will continue to go on this breakneck pace to ever higher and greater speeds, and they'll probably also have greater and greater demand for switches as they build out data centers all over the world," Casemore said. "Enterprises will be going at a slower cadence, but they'll still need data center switching that suits their requirements."

Mary Reines joined TechTarget in October 2022 as a news writer covering networking. Prior to TechTarget, Reines worked for five years as arts editor at the Marblehead Reporter, her hometown newspaper. She received her bachelor's in journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she served as an assistant news editor for the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian.