Top of Rack - higher speed, higher density

How energy dense do you want to make your rack.

Arista announces two new switches that certainly fit high density, high speed ToR models.

Loaded with QSFP100 and backward compatible all the way to....10Gbps.

100GbE, 40GbE, 4x10GbE, 4x25GbE or 2x 50GbE

New Arista Switches

The thing I find really interesting, because we all know port densities and bandwidth is guaranteed to grow anyway... but,

7W / port

Evidently Arista believes that electrical consumption is a sunk cost in servicing the workload....

So do I.

This really drives the concept of the "logical rack" the number of racks that can be covered by a pair of ToR switches in the Spine and Leaf architectural model.

Let's conduct a short breakdown on the 32 port unit.

~ 28 100GbE connections for hosts (so, 28 hosts in ~ 2 racks at 2U size)

~28 40GbE connections for hosts ( 28 hosts in ~ 2 racks at 2U size)

~112 10GbE or 25GbE connections for hosts  (112 hosts in ~ 7 racks at 2U size)

~56 50GbE connections for hosts  (56 hosts in ~ 4 racks at 2U size)

using a pair of ports for 100GbE uplink and a pair of ports for inner-Leaf connections (not including options with the SFP+ ports)

Makes for some very well connected hosts and at ~18kW / rack, some fairly dense commodity computing....