Arista is bulking up its R4 series with speedier models and line cards to advance high-performance networks.
Arista Networks has added more models, greater speed, and new line cards to its portfolio of high-performance networking gear targeting large-scale AI and cloud data center customers.
The networking vendor is expanding its R4 family of high-capacity gear to include the 7020, a new fixed 10G to 25G leaf edge router with 100G uplinks; the 7280 fixed 100G leaf or spine aggregation box with 800G uplinks; and the 7800 high-end, modular, 800G spine router featuring what Arista calls 3.2Tbps HyperPort Ethernet capacity.
“The R4 portfolio is really a Swiss Army knife in that it offers a common set of silicon and software capabilities across a range of platform options, which are suitable for AI, for data center, and it offers customers the flexibility to deploy the right kind of form factor whether they need a leaf or spine configuration,” Brendan Gibbs, Arista vice president, AI, routing and switching platforms, told Network World. The portfolio offers “a range of port speeds, density options, and platform interfaces if they need capacity for a peering role, or to support AI clusters.”
With this announcement, Arista is not only expanding the available options but also addressing the need for speed, Gibbs said.
“From an AI perspective, if all the GPUs and XPUs are 400G equipped, you need a higher-speed spine platform for aggregation. So, we’re addressing that need with fixed and modular options,” Gibbs said. “The traditional enterprise data center also has complex workloads that drive expanded speed requirements at the leaf layer. If you go from a 10G leaf to a 25G leaf, that just pushes the requirement for the spine and aggregation speed. So, we see now more customers wanting a dense 25G data center leaf, which means you need denser 100G to aggregate. And that drives the spine speed from 400G to 800G, all of which we are addressing.”
The 7020R4 10G and 25G boxes are top-of-rack Ethernet switches that include deep packet buffers for heavy-duty server edge workloads and storage aggregation or campus spine aggregation for downstream PoE switches, according to Arista. The boxes offer up to 50% lower power consumption per Gbps compared to prior generation switches.
The 7280R4-32PE features 25.6 Tbps switching capacity and supports 32x 800 GbE ports with Octal Small Form-Factor Pluggable (OSFP) or Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable – Double Density (QSFP-DD) optical uplinks. It’s targeted at customers that need to support AI/ML workloads and routing-intensive edge use cases, Arista stated. It supports 25% lower power per Gbps compared to the prior generation, according to Arista.
A second version, the 7280R4-64QC-10PE, is aimed at dense, deep buffer-requiring workloads in data centers with 100G/800G requirements. The box supports 64x 100 GbE and 10x 800 GbE OSFP in addition to 4x 1/10/25 GbE for management or additional low-speed interfaces, Arista started. The box promises 20% lower power requirement per Gbps over the prior generation of the box, Arista stated.
At the high end, the new 7800R4 is the vendor’s latest flagship networking box capable of supporting 36 ports of 800GbE OSFP and QSFP-DD line cards in 4, 8, 12, and 16-slot chassis configurations. The box offers a high radix capacity – meaning it can be fully loaded with line card and support 576 physical 800 Gigabit Ethernet ports or 1,152 400GbE ports, Arista stated.
In addition, the 7800R supports a new 3.2 TbpsEthernet line card called HyperPort that supports 4 800G channels to tie together widely dispersed data centers via a technique Arista calls “scale across.” It’s designed to scale across buildings in the same metropolitan region or across sites in different cities or countries. This routed Data Center Interconnect technology that can extend AI clusters over Metro or long-haul WAN links, according to Arista.
“Building on the flexible Extensible Operating System (EOS) software foundation [which runs across all Arista networking gear] and deep buffering, HyperPort delivers up to 44% faster job completion time (JCT) for high-bandwidth AI flows via a single high-speed port, compared to alternate solutions that load-balance traffic across multiple 800G ports,” Gibbs stated in a blog post he co-wrote with Martin Hull, vice president and general manager, cloud and AI platforms, at Arista.
Arista envisions the 7800R as the heart of some very large networks – from the central spine box in large-scale enterprise, cloud hyperscaler and service provider networks, to AI Ethernet fabrics, to cloud data centers, to campus or metro aggregation sites.
Another important feature across all of the new R4 Series devices is encryption everywhere – every port is secured by MACsec and can support TunnelSec or IPsec and VXLANsec depending on what customers need, Gibbs said.
“Having the ability to do encryption per port at very high speeds is something a lot of our customers are asking for,” Gibbs said. “So, we can secure traffic between data centers, racks or sites without requiring additional encryption appliances.”
EOS lets customers configure per-port encryption keys, policies, and security key management sessions directly, according to Arista.
“The 800GbE market is growing explosively with port shipments more than tripling sequentially in Q2 ’25, and Arista led in branded market share for both 800GbE as well as overall data center Ethernet switching,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research, in a statement. “These new 800GbE products from Arista are well-timed to capitalize on this segment’s projected 90% five-year average annual growth rate driven by AI, storage, and general compute workloads.”
The 7800R4 modular systems, 7800R4 line cards, and 7280R4 platforms are shipping now. The 7020R4 chassis platforms and 7800R4 with HyperPort will be available in the first quarter of 2026, the company stated.
