Thinking Outside the Box for Network Acceleration

There is a continued push to go even “faster.” Lowering port to port latency while maintaining features and increasing link speeds and system density is a significant technology challenge for designers and the laws of physics. Since the first release of Arista’s 7100 and 7150 switch families, the company has been a partner in building best-in-class low latency trading networks that are today deployed in global financial institutions and trading locations.

Cutting edge customers took the approach of disaggregating network functions into pools of functionality – extremely fast Layer 1 switching, operating as low as 5 ns and FPGA-driven trading pipelines running at under 40 ns with the Arista 7130 family. This approach allowed more sophisticated L2 / L3 networking functionality, such as the ability to tap any flow or enable routing protocols, to run on general-purpose systems, including the Arista 7050X, 7060X and 7170 full-featured platforms, using merchant silicon with billions of packets per second and low latency.

The 400G Era

As an industry leader in data-driven networking, Arista’s introduction of 400G platforms in 2019 intersected the emerging needs of hyper-scale cloud and HPC customers to dramatically increase bandwidth for specific ultra-high performance applications.