Cisco vs. Arista Networks, choosing Arista could save you $13.3 million

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Cisco vs. Arista Networks, choosing Arista could save you $13.3 million
Tue, 04/20/10 - 11:53pm Add your comment

There's a new alternative to Cisco in the data center, it's called the Arista Networks 7500 series modular 10Gb ethernet switching platform. Introduced this week, a fully configured system is available at less than $1,200 per wirespeed port (possibly saving you $13.3 million on a comparable system from Cisco). The Arista 7500 is available now and is in production in mission-critical facilities today.

View an update on the new Arista 7500:

Data centers: Cisco's multi-tier architecture vs. the Arista 2-tier cloud network

Breaking News: Arista Wins Best of Interop Las Vegas 2010

According to Arista, the 7500 has 10 terabits per second of switching capacity and 384 wirespeed L2/L3 10GbE ports in only eleven rack-units.

Arista claims the 7500 is five times faster, one-tenth the power draw per wirespeed port and one-half the footprint compared to other modular data center switches.

Arista added that the modern data center demands radically simpler network designs for large-scale server, storage, and cloud deployments. And it insists the simple two-tier design of Arista's 7500 spine switches and Arista leaf switches can support over 8,000 servers with over 100,000 cores. This enables predictable performance per server and low end-to-end latency.

When compared to Cisco and its other modular data center switch competitors, the Arista 7500 is receiving excellent recommendations from customers, analysts and technology partners.

Arista continued that the 7500 has true front-to-rear airflow without 'turning' the air in an 'S' shape like most other front-to-rear airflow systems do. By avoiding turns in the airflow you reduce turbulence and hot spots and can use a lower power fan to achieve the same cooling effect

Finally, perhaps the most compelling attribute of the new 7500, especially as it relates to Cisco, is the price to performance value delivered by the new 7500.

Arista commissioned the European Advanced Network Test Center to validate the performance of the Arista 7500 Series.

Read more test results...

In the video below, Arista vice president of marketing, Douglas Gourlay, gives a quick product overview of the Arista 7500 series switch. Gourlay will also be a featured DEEP DIVE speaker at the Las Vegas Interop next week.

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Interop Las Vegas 2010 Panel:

DEEP DIVE: Why Networking Must Fundamentally Change

Tuesday, April 27 - 2:45 PM-5:00 PM, Mandalay Bay Hotel, Lagoon L

In this two-hour, rapid-paced session, the first group of panelists will discuss what has to happen to the data center LAN in order to support virtualization and what migration strategies make the most sense. The second group of panelists will discuss the data center automation and orchestration functionality that is ready for production networks today and how that may change over the next twelve months.