Arista Routing Solutions

Wed Apr 20 14:37:57 UTC 2016

NANOG,

I know Arista is typically a switch manufacturer, but with their recently
announced Arista 7500R Series and soon to be announced but already shipping
7280R Series Arista is officially getting into the routing game. The fixed
1U 7280R Series looks quite impressive. The 7500R series is your
traditional chassis and line card based solution.

Both of these products have the ability to hold the full internet routing
table, and Arista is working on MPLS features. Both of these new products
use the latest Broadcom Jerico chipsets.

I would like to know how viable of a product NANOG thinks these Arista
routers are compared to service provider grade routers from Cisco, Juniper,
ALU, and Brocade?

Cost wise, Arista seems to be much, much less per port. For example, the
1U Arista 7280R with 48x10GbE (SFP+) & 6x100GbE QSFP cost about the same as
what Juniper sells a MX104 with only four 10G ports for (Under 20K).

Can the Arista EOS software combine with their hardware based on the
Broadcom Jericho chipset truly compete  with the custom chipsets and
accompanying software from the big guys?