It’s back to the future for Arista with new high-frequency trading switches

Arista is releasing three new devices in the 7130 Series: 7132LB, 7135LB, and 7130B-32YD. The switches are designed to enhance network performance by significantly increasing bandwidth and reducing latency. In tandem with this, Arista is broadening its arsenal of field-programmable gate array applications to fully support 25G solutions. Arista released an updated version of its FPGA Developer’s Kit, giving customers a comprehensive solution.

One of the major hurdles in migrating to 25G is optics. The IEEE’s introduction of Forward Error Correction, or FEC, for 25G optics, while helpful in many respects, added unwanted latency. FEC improves reliability by detecting and correcting errors in retransmitting dropped packets, which requires additional time and logic adding up to 250 nanoseconds of latency.
But in HFT, there is no value in adding latency for greater reliability: Market data information needs to be as close to live as possible. FEC has greatly improved network reliability and performance for most use cases but is ineffective for real-time trading.

Arista’s 25G enhanced performance optics are a noteworthy addition, potentially making networks about 2.5 times faster. This increase in speed is thanks to the combined effects of reduced queuing, serialization delays and the strategic omission of FEC. Unlike conventional 25G optics, which require FEC and add approximately 250 nanoseconds of latency, Arista’s iteration functions without FEC.