Technology Alliance Between Ibrix and Arista Networks

Arista Networks, Inc., a vendor of high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) and cloud networking solutions and IBRIX Inc., in scalable file serving solutions, announced a joint collaboration to deliver a scalable, cost-effective, highly resilient NAS and iSCSI cloud storage solution for financial services, media, Web2.0, HPC, and cloud computing applications.

With its highest port density on the market (at 48 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports per 1RU), full non-blocking performance, sub-microsecond latency, highly resilient EOS software, and unique live-patching capability, Arista’s 7100 family of 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches provide an ideal interconnect for iSCSI and NAS protocols. Coupled with IBRIX Fusion’, IBRIX’s purpose-built scale-out NAS platform, they provide a powerful solution that helps companies eliminate storage bottlenecks and increase I/O throughput for their increasingly demanding applications, while providing a flexible deployment methodology for the best performance at the right price.

The Arista 7100 and IBRIX Fusion delivered a single-stream file read performance of almost 600MB/sec in a one-to-one client-to-file server ratio configuration, and a request/response rate of 46,000 per second, up to 6 times better than with 1 Gigabit Ethernet.

These results demonstrate the superior level of performance of the IBRIX/Arista cloud storage solution, addressing the needs of various applications, including:

• Animation rendering and special effects that require processing tens of thousands of files to complete one second of film,
• Predictive financial applications that rely on complex time-series analysis, which require fast access to historical data and extreme low-latency when processing new market entries, and
• Web services that need the ability to scale rapidly as they process ever-growing amounts of user-generated content each day with data sets growing into the petabytes and billions of files.

"Arista Network’s fault tolerant design features are unparalleled," said Patrick Osborne, Senior Director of Business Development, IBRIX. "IBRIX’s pay-as-you-grow solution for scale-out NAS, coupled with Arista’s low-latency 10GbE switching technology, is ideally suited for enterprises that are looking to efficiently manage increasing volumes of stored data. These test results demonstrate the value we deliver to the data center, particularly in enabling efficiency and high-availability in cloud storage for customers in the Financial Services, Media and Web2.0 verticals."

"We are pleased to partner with IBRIX to deliver cloud storage solutions," said Mansour Karam, Director of Business Development at Arista. "10 Gigabit Ethernet is the interconnect technology of choice for network attached storage (NAS) and iSCSI protocols, and Arista switches are uniquely suited for cloud storage."

To read a PDF paper detailing the configuration, methodology and results