Arista looks to connect clouds

Arista Networks this week expanded its data center interconnect offerings with products designed to enable the interconnection of cloud networks.

Arista is adding capabilities that extend its spine networking platforms, EOS operating system software and CloudVision management system to include cloud interconnect features. These capabilities include Spine Transit, Spine Interconnect and Spine Peering.

+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Arista adds security to cloud software+

Spine Transit includes a long-haul coherent DWDM 6-port 100G line card with integrated MACsec encryption for the Arista 7500E spine switches. The new line card enables wire-rate switching with integrated Coherent DWDM optical interfaces for transmission over distances up to 5,000 kilometers.

The line card is designed as an alternative to external DWDM devices otherwise required for long haul transmission. It also includes integrated IEEE 802.1AE MACsec for 256-bit encryption on all ports at 100Gbps, for security in transporting confidential information between cloud data centers.

Arista says Box, the cloud-based document storage and collaboration company, is using the 7500E and coherent DWDM card.

Spine interconnect is a use case employing VXLAN encapsulation and overlays for Layer 2 service extension between cloud sites. This is an alternative to traditional Layer 2 protocols that are complex, or proprietary ones like Cisco’s Overlay Transport Virtualization, Arista says.

Spine peering is an EOS feature that supports full Internet routes in less expensive merchant silicon-based spine platforms, like Arista’s 7500E switch. It is targeted at content providers like Netflix which use expensive and sophisticated policy-based peering routers to route content out of the data center and over the Internet, and connect geographically distributed locations.

All of the components of Arista’s cloud interconnect solutions are shipping and available today.