The Arista 7500 Series modular switch sets a new standard for performance, density, reliability, and power efficiency for data center switches. In a compact 7RU (4-slot) or 11RU (8-slot) chassis, the Arista 7500 Series offers up to 10 Terabits of fabric capacity, 384 wirespeed 10 GbE ports and 5.76 BPPS of L2/3 throughput. The Arista 7500 offers a comprehensive feature set, as well as future support for the 40GbE and 100GbE standards. With front-to-rear airflow, redundant and hot swappable supervisor, power, fabric and cooling modules, the 7500 is energy efficient with typical power consumption of 10 watts per port for a fully loaded chassis. All of these attributes make the Arista 7500 an ideal platform for building low latency, scalable, data center networks.
Arista EOS
All Arista products including the 7500 series switches run Arista EOS software. The same binary image supports all Arista products, making it easy for network administrators to standardize the operating system across all switches in the data center. With the addition of Arista 7500, EOS has been extended to support redundant supervisor modules with stateful switchover without the loss of data plane forwarding.
Arista EOS is a modular switch operating system with a unique state sharing architecture that cleanly separates switch state from protocol processing and application logic. Built on top of a standard Linux kernel, all EOS processes run in their own protected memory space and exchange state through a memory based database. This multi-process state sharing architecture provides the foundation for in-service-software updates and self-healing resiliency. Arista EOS automates the networking infrastructure natively with VMware vSphere via VM Tracer to provide VM discovery, auto-VLAN provisioning, and unprecedented visibility into the virtual computing environment.
Additional highlights include the following:
Modular 10Gb Ethernet Switching
- Offered in 8 and 4-slot configurations
- 384 or 192 wirespeed 1/10Gb Ethernet port options
- Up to 5.76Bpps L2 and L3 switching and routing
- 2.3GB packet buffer per linecard module
- 4.5usec port to port latency
System Capabilities and Architecture
- Up to 10 Terabit lossless switch fabric
- 648Gb/s bandwidth per linecard Slot (1.25 Terabit full-duplex)
- Low-latency, lossless, VOQ fabric
- Data Center Class airflow and resiliency
Advanced Technology
- Designed for real-world deployments of 40Gb and 100GbE
- Data Center Bridging – lossless Ethernet transport
Energy Efficiency
- Less than 10 watts per wirespeed 10GbE port
- Gold Climate Saver power supplies
- Front-to-rear cooling and HVAC
Scaling Data Center Performance
The Arista 7500 enables dramatically faster and simpler network designs for large-scale data centers. When used in conjunction with Arista 7048 or 7100 leaf switches and Arista’s Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) technology, a pair of 7508 Switches can support 9200 Servers with a leaf/spine active/active L2 network topology. With four Arista 7508 switches at Layer 3, more than 18,000 Servers can be connected with a non-blocking, low-latency, two-stage network that provides predictable end-to-end application performance.
Deterministic Network Performance
The Arista 7500 uses a deep buffer virtual output queue (VOQ) architecture that eliminates head-of-line (HOL) blocking and virtually eliminates packet drops even in the most congested network scenarios. An advanced traffic scheduler fairly allocates bandwidth between all virtual output queues while accurately following queue disciplines including weighted fair queuing, fixed priority, or hybrid schemes including 802.1Qaz ETS. As a result, the Arista 7500 can handle the most demanding data center requirements with ease, including mixed traffic loads of real-time, multicast, and storage traffic.
Designed for High Availability
The Arista 7500 is designed specifically for high-availability requirements. The hardware supports hot-swappable redundant power, cooling, fabric, supervisors, and linecards. The fabric is N+1 redundant with graceful degradation. The Arista EOS software supports stateful failover between the redundant supervisors as well as self healing and live patching through in-service- software updates.
7500 Chassis – 8-slot and 4-slot
The 7500 chassis provides room for two supervisor modules, four or eight linecard modules, four power supply modules, and six fabric modules. The 7504 chassis fits into 7 rack units while the 7508 chassis fits into 11U of a standard data center rack. Supervisor and linecard modules plug in from the front, while the fan, fabric and power supply modules are inserted from the rear. The midplane is completely passive and provides control plane connectivity to each of the fabric and linecard modules. The system design is optimized for data center deployments with front-to-rear airflow.
7500 Supervisor Module
The supervisor modules for the 7500 series run Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS) and handle all control plane and management functions of the system. One supervisor module is needed to run the system and a second can be added for 1+1 control plane redundancy. Each supervisor module takes up only a half slot resulting in very efficient use of space and a higher density design. The dual-core x86 CPU provides the necessary control plane performance needed to run an advanced data center switch. Each supervisor module also includes an LCD panel in the front to monitor system status making it easy for network operators to quickly identify issues.
7500 Fabric Module
At the heart of the 7500 series is the fabric. It interconnects all linecards in a non-blocking architecture irrespective of the traffic pattern. Each linecard module connects to the fabric with multiple links and data packets are spread across these links to fully utilize the fabric capacity using a fabric control protocol. Unlike typical hash-based selection of fabric links, the 7500 architecture provides connectivity from any port to any other port with no drops. The fabric modules are N+1 redundant and can be hot swapped with very little impact to data traffic. The Fabric Module for the 7508 Chassis and the 7504 Chassis are different based on the size of the chassis and the 7504 Fabric integrates the fan assembly.
7500 Power Supply Module
The 7500 series switches are provisioned with four 2900W AC power supplies. The power supplies are 2+2 grid redundant and hotswappable. Each power supply must be connected to a 16A (20A UL) 200-240V AC circuit. The power supplies are gold climate saver rated and have an efficiency of over 90% with single stage conversion to the internal 12V DC voltage.
7548S Linecard Module
The 7548S Linecard offers 48 wirespeed 1/10GbE SFP+ ports with an aggregate throughput of 760 Mpps at both Layer 2 and Layer 3. The Arista 7508 chassis can be fully populated with eight linecards to achieve a wirespeed 384 10GbE ports. The virtual output queue architecture eliminates head-of-line blocking and with 2.3GB of packet memory on each linecard, approximately 40 msec of traffic can be buffered per ingress port, virtually eliminating packet drops in congestion scenarios. Each linecard module connects to all fabric modules in a non-blocking full mesh. The redundant fabric modules allow the system to continue forwarding.
- Download Arista Networks 7500 Series Switch Data Sheet
- Download Arista Networks Product Quick Reference Guide
- Download Arista Networks White Paper – Architecting Low Latency Cloud Networks
- Download Arista Networks White Paper – Switching Architecture for Cloud Network Design
- Download Arista Networks White Paper – Myth About Microbursts
- Watch Arista Networks 7500 Series Overview with Andy Bechtolsheim Video
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