Today, Arista Networks announced upgrades to its R-Series platform — based on the latest merchant silicon from Broadcom — that Arista says is twice the density and half the power of custom routing silicon. Arista introduced its 7500R universal spine and 7280R universal leaf for combined switching and routing in data centers in 2016. Now, it’s upgraded the silicon to Broadcom’s Jericho Plus.
“The 7500R was already using Jericho for the last 18 months,” said Martin Hull, Arista senior director of product management. With the Jericho Plus upgrade, the R-series delivers more than 150 Tb/s of capacity for switching and routing applications.
“When we compare to Juniper — that would be trying to sell directly against our options with their QFX 10000 series — Jericho is twice the density and half the power,” claimed Hull.
Arista is targeting three particular types of customers for its R-Series: cable companies, Internet exchanges, and cloud hosting companies.
It says it’s working with some large cable companies that are looking at its universal spine and leaf offering, although Arista can’t name those customers.
“Today, a cable headend is extremely complex,” said Arthi Ayyangar, a director of product management at Arista. “The cable modem termination system (CMTS) tends to be a completely integrated and closed solution. The first step is to open up these designs.”
It is known that cable companies are working on breaking up their closed, monolithic systems located at the cable headend, moving the functions out into remote PHY nodes closer to customers. And they’re transforming their cable headends to look more like data centers.
“That’s where we come in,” said Ayyangar. “Once the cable headend is all IP, that’s where we bring our strength.”
For the Internet exchange customer use case, Ayyangar said Internet exchanges have built their infrastructure on Layer 2 or MPLS, but that type of infrastructure can be replaced with Arista’s universal spine and leaf. The Internet exchange firm Netnod has used the Arista 7500R/7280R and EOS to develop a flexible infrastructure that accommodates future increases in capacity.
Arista is also beginning to work with Affirmed Networks on expanded routing use cases. “The idea is to partner with Affirmed for vEPC, together with our universal leaf/spine and programmable aspects,” said Ayyangar.