Description
The Arista 7300 Series modular switches are part of the Arista portfolio of data center switches. The 7300 Series with 7300X Series line cards increase flexibility and scalability for data center switches supporting both leaf and spine and SplineTM applications for collapsed end of row and aggregation. The 7300X systems share a common architecture with the Arista 7050X and 7250X Series and offer a choice of three modular systems, a 4-slot, 8-slot and 16 slot that support advanced features for network monitoring, precision timing and network virtualization to deliver scalable high performance for software defined cloud networking.
Increased adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet servers and applications requiring higher bandwidth is driving rapid adoption of 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switching. The 7300 Series support a choice of high density line cards in combination with wire speed layer 2/3/4 performance that provides a flexible combination of 100M, 1G, 10G and 40G switching to design large leaf and spine networks for scale-out of east-west traffic patterns with low latency and power efficiency.
With reversible front-to-rear or rear-to-front airflow, redundant and hot swappable supervisor, power, fabric and cooling modules the system is purpose built for data centers. The 7300 Series is energy efficient with typical power consumption of under 3 watts per 10GbE port for a fully loaded chassis. All of these attributes make the Arista 7300 Series an ideal platform for building reliable, low latency, resilient and scalable data center networks. Combined with Arista EOS the 7300 Series delivers advanced features for big data, cloud, virtualized and traditional designs.
Arista EOS
All Arista products including the 7300 Series runs the same Arista EOS software binary image simplifying network administration with a single standard across all switches. 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 an in-memory database. This multi-process state sharing architecture provides the foundation for in-service-software updates and self-healing resiliency together with stateful switchover without the loss of data plane forwarding.
Arista EOS enables advanced monitoring and automation capabilities such as Zero Touch Provisioning, LANZ, VM Tracer and Linux based tools to be run natively on the switch.
Software Defined Cloud Networks
Arista Software Defined Cloud Networking (SDCN), combines the principles that have made cloud computing the unstoppable force that it is: automation, self service provisioning, and linear scaling of both performance and economics coupled with the trend in Software Defined Networking that delivers: network virtualization, custom programmability, simplified architectures, and lower capital expenditure. This combination creates a best-in-class software foundation for maximizing the value of the network to both the enterprise and service provider data center. A new architecture for the most mission-critical location within the IT infrastructure that simplifies management and provisioning, speeds up service delivery, lowers costs and creates opportunities for competitive differentiation, while putting control and visibility back in the hands of the network and systems administrators.
The Four Pillars of Arista's Software Defined Cloud Networking:
• Universal Cloud Network – scalable standards based MLAG at Layer 2, ECMP for Layer 3 and VXLAN for most flexibility
• Cloud Control – Standards based AEM, ZTP/ZTR, LANZ and DANZ
• Network Wide Virtualization – Multi-vendor API Support with eAPI, VXLAN and NSX, and other encapsulation techniques
• Network Applications and Automated Management – Network applications; single point of management and open – Openflow, Openstack, OpenVirtualSwitch and OVSDB
Dynamic Buffer Allocation
In cut-through mode, the Arista 7300X series switches forward packets with a latency of less than 2 usec. Upon congestion, the packets are buffered in shared packet memory that has a total size of 12 Mbytes. Unlike other architectures that have fixed per-port packet memory, the 7300X Series use Dynamic Buffer Allocation (DBA) to allocate up to 6MB of packet memory to a single port for lossless forwarding.