The Next Generation in Cloud-Scale Networking: The Arista 7500E

Today we are announcing our new 7500E modular switch, the fastest and densest modular switching platform in the industry, enabling cloud networks to scale to over 100,000 servers and millions of virtual machines.


The Arista 7500E is a remarkable 3X better than its predecessor. It offers 3X the number of ports, 3X the fabric bandwidth, 3X the packet buffer, 3X the supervisor performance, and 3X the power-efficiency, without a chassis or power upgrade.


But the real story of the 7500E it that it enables customers to build a universal cloud networking infrastructure for the worldʼs largest data centers that can handle even the most demanding workloads with ease.


Letʼs take a look inside this remarkable new switch.

3X the Fabric Bandwidth

The 7500E has 3.84 Tbps fabric bandwidth per slot, or 30 Tbps per 8-slot chassis, three times the bandwidth of the first generation 7500.

3X the Port Density

The 7508E supports 1152 10G, 288 40G or 96 100G wire-speed ports in a 11U chassis, the highest port density in the industry and three times the number of ports of the first generation 7500.

3X the Packet Buffer

The 7500E comes with a world-record 144 GByte of packet buffer per 8-slot chassis, or three times the buffer capacity per port of the previous generation. Large packet buffers are essential for bursty applications and speed conversion.

3X the Supervisor Performance

The 7500E has a new quad-core Supervisor CPU that offers 3X the control plane throughput of the original 7500 Supervisor to keep up with the higher number of ports.

3X the Power Efficiency

The typical 7500E power consumption is the same as the original 7500 switch, which means that for a fully loaded system the power per port is 1/3 of the first generation.

Triple-Speed Line Cards

The 7500E offers another industry-first: a triple-speed 10G/40G/100G line card with integrated SR optics. The line card has 12 MXP (multi-speed port) connectors that can be software configured as 12x100G, 36x40G or 144x10G, ports, delivering the same cost-efficient bandwidth at every speed.
The three other new 7500E line cards are:

• 36-port QSFP, which supports 36 40G ports or 144 10G ports, enabling the full range of QSFP PHYs including copper cables, active optical cables and optical transceivers
• 48-port 10G-SFP with dual MXP ports that can be configured in software as dual 100GigE, six 40GigE, or 24 10GigE ports
• 48-port 10G-SFP, supporting the full range of SFP transceivers.

All line cards offer the same deep packet buffers that support 128 MBytes per 10G port,512 MBytes per 40G port and 1.5 GBytes per 100G port, large L2/L3 lookup tables, and wire-speed VXLAN processing on every port.

Arista EOS and SDN

Aristaʼs EOS is the most advanced switch operating system in the industry, offering self-healing resilience, in-service updates and binary compatibility across all Arista products. The latest EOS release adds to this a set of advanced Software Defined Networking features that support programmatic control and enhanced monitoring that so far were not available on any modular switching platform. These features include:

• Precise traffic monitoring with Arista LANZ, DANZ, and Tap Aggregation
• Rapid Automatic Indication of Link-Loss (RAIL) for fast convergence in large clusters
• Health Tracer for system-wide health monitoring
• VM Tracer for network wide workload mobility in VMware and OpenStack clouds
• VXLAN Gateway processing to enable multi-tenant network virtualization

Arista Innovations Outpace the Industry

The extraordinary performance of the 7500E platform gives customers the flexibility and freedom to implement 10/40/100G cloud-scale networks simply not practical previously. In a 32-way ECMP spine, the 7500E supports wire-speed operation across 9,216 40G Ethernet ports, capable of handling the most demanding cloud network requirements.