Spine Interconnect: Production-ready, standards-based VXLAN solutions for Layer 2 service extension between sites.

Spine Peering: An Arista EOS approach for supporting full Internet routes in cost-effective merchant silicon spine platforms.

Box, an enterprise content management and collaboration platform with more than 40 million users at 50,000 businesses globally, including 52% of the Fortune 500, is leveraging the Arista 7500E Coherent DWDM solution to help support the increase in bandwidth demand between data center sites as it grows and expands. The Arista 7500E Coherent DWDM solution delivers secure, high-performance and cost-effective capacity for Box’s inter-site connectivity, allowing the company to scale, while continuing to meet customer expectations of delivering secure, always on, service, regardless of location.

Traditionally, geographically dispersed data centers have been built based on a single primary location with any other locations considered backups. However, today’s scale out cloud data centers are moving to a model where geographically distributed data centers are treated as single common logical compute and storage cluster. This requires not only increased bandwidth between sites but also increased levels of security. In maintaining the cloud networking principles, these solutions must also be open and standards-based, with a focus on operational efficiencies at scale.

As distances between sites increase, discrete costly optical devices are required to support the long-haul and high bandwidth connections. The new 7500E Series 100GbE line card enables wire-rate switching with integrated Coherent DWDM optical interfaces for transmission over distances up to 5,000 kilometers. This consolidated solution provides an alternative to external DWDM devices otherwise required for long haul transmission. In addition, this line card includes integrated IEEE 802.1AE MACsec for 256-bit encryption on all ports at 100Gbps, which provides security for transporting confidential information between cloud data centers.

"Equinix is the leader in providing Data Center interconnection services for Enterprises, Content providers, Internet Service Providers, and Cloud Service Providers. The Equinix Global Internet Exchange (IX) provides L2 interconnectivity to all the peering participants over a geographically distributed L2 fabric. Arista's VXLAN cloud interconnect solution on the 7500E platform has been instrumental in addressing the scale-out of our IX fabric", said Ihab Tarazi, CTO of Equinix. "By moving to a resilient, cloud scale L3 design with Arista's VXLAN solution and EOS, we get better operational efficiencies and higher performance from our network while keeping up with our business growth."

Arista, a leader in VXLAN solutions, is building on its network virtualization solutions within the data center by introducing VXLAN as a solution for Layer 2 interconnect between clouds. Traditional Layer 2 interconnect solutions based on complex or proprietary protocols are not meeting the open needs of today’s cloud networking architectures. This VXLAN solution extends Arista’s Universal Cloud Network designs by providing an open and standards-based approach that is production ready across a variety of interconnect use cases.

With the proliferation of content providers connecting geographically distributed locations, operators rely on policy-based traffic engineering to efficiently route content out of the data center over the internet. These applications traditionally require peering routers, which are traditionally larger and more expensive router platforms with the capability to store the full internet routing table in the hardware forwarding path, at the internet edge.

Arista Networks Inc.